The 45 Colt War
by Kaitsurinu
Summary: [1x2, Solo2] Duo deals with the haunting memory that is Solo and the infatuating, violent hairtrigger reality that is Heero... all while staring down the barrel of a gun. OWARI
1. Guns Are for the Artless

The .45 Colt War 

By Kaitsurinu 

Part 1 

"Guns Are [for the] Artless" 

Contrary to most beliefs, I have to tell you now, my friend the Perfect Soldier isn't the laptop extremist that he may seem. Really. I consider his time spent with that thin black sheet of metal and a screen to be very productive. After all, whatever he types can be the difference from being viciously ambushed during a mission and having a metallic object skewered between my ribs or being viciously prepared and doing the aforementioned to my enemy. It can be the difference between hidden explosives blazing out of control in the night and needlessly killing civilians or detonating flawlessly and collapsing an OZ building on its ass, and it usually is. 

Hours furiously typing are pennies in the dollar scheme of war anyway. Heero and his laptop have saved me relentlessly, so, I let him be about it. 

Boots clunk vaguely into the room and he glances at me, lounging on my bed, half-dissembled gun in my lap and gleaming near my toes. Usually, I'll grace him with a grin or even a jaunty greeting like 'Good morning' or something, but I don't like to waver my concentration by uselessly chatting towards him when I'm cleaning this gun. It's my favorite. Sinfully black .45. Officially matte blue, but it's black in my book. Colts have always fascinated me despite the fact they were old by most standards when the colonies were basically still in their fathers' sacs and as rare as shit from a statue nowadays. 

Today, he grunts and strides off my vision somewhere into the anonymous dorm room that we've taken prisoner and poked full of holes to cloak our weapons and bugs. Do I look? Naw. I don't have to baby-sit him. 

Clinks around the sink. 

For fun, Heero will sharpen my knives. 

It's only fair that I remain silent. He has never once questioned my liberal dubbing of myself by the name of Shinigami, so I don't pry into his logic either no matter how weird the gesture. I find that to be invasive and rude. Glowered steely at me, yes, but never spoken the words. 

And second of all, I can't decipher his monotone grunts for shit. Not at all. It's a very common misconception that people who often resort to lifeless, disparaging noises like that regularly in their sentences have actually put meaning behind them. Such is the case with steely, stone-blue eyed Heero here. I couldn't tell you the difference between a 'Hn' and it's fucking twin brother if one meant, "I love you, Duo, take me now," and the other was "I'm chaffing." Ha. Are you kidding? When he decides he's going to speak to you about anything of true importance, which is mostly the only time that he will, he refines every syllable to get his point across very quickly, very efficiently. Grunts and snorts are just addendum, little wordless emotions. I could read into them, but I've learned early on, that it'd be like trying to chew on bricks. Meaningless and vain and with the tendency of being painful. I know I must sound an awful, almost nauseatingly amount like Heero, but this is only my observation and silly, fluffy, over-romanticized pining would cloud that. 

So, when he grunts at me, he's actually just ignoring me. Something to pacify me. Peachy. That makes me so much happier. Or, on restless days, reining in some primal growl of impatience. 

Leather is cuffing mutely in the background. I can nearly hear my virgin knives gleaming even more perfectly, as Heero seems to sharpen them to razor point and find something wrong with it being the sharpest it can and just continues on. I haven't used them thus far into the war but obviously need a brisk sharpening. Actually, Trowa lent them to me. My old knives, ferreted from a trashcan and a shifty guy's pocket respectively, were lost long ago during my orphan days on the street. 

Before Solo. Therefore, before Duo. 

I picture Solo's scruffy, dimly attractive face for a second, and Heero's replaces it. The brown, wooden bathroom door is ajar, aforementioned slim Japanese brunette gliding out. Not walking – moving with a purpose. Chh. Page me when Heero Yuy does not have a purpose. 

Surprised, I suppose, I jolt my leg slightly and it chinks the dissembled, greased gun piece, catching his shady blue eyes. I didn't expect him to finish so soon, so I lean slightly back against my pillow and tell him so, even though it's against my code for cleaning my gun. 

My black Colt isn't alive, so it can't get impatient. 

"Something wrong?" I ask, as Heero freezes and graces me with a flat, fluid blue gaze that indicates he's listening quite intensely to me, something that happens only when he's not busied with something else mission related. He stares at me, non-threatening, non-questioning, as blue and blank as a chalkboard is green and blank. Poor thing. I know for a fact that, like a lemmon driven by madness to the ocean, a soldier as rigidly structured as him finds little recreation activities to be worth the effort they demand and is often plagued with bouts of intense boredom. A toy monkey with stolen cymbals. 

"Nothing," he says truthfully. Nothing is wrong because nothing is really happening. 

I know him so well. 

Somewhere primal, gleaming in the back of his pretty blue eyes, I, Duo Maxwell, know that he doesn't feel right, doesn't feel whole until a task is finished and another starts up again. It's not unusual or eccentric by any standards. The laziest slugabeds in the world have the same problem, as does anyone else. People feel strange if nothing is happening, it's that like dread you get when it's silent and you sense paranoia coming down on you. Heero just feels more incomplete at more times because, if you have not noticed, he's expected to save the world, and when you have do something like that, you don't want to slack off much. 

A lopsided grin aches on my face. I hadn't given it permission. 

"You don't feel like sharpening my knives anymore, huh?" I say, sarcasm peppered over my voice. Sometimes, I feel too damned sarcastic and quick to react with an endless reserve of it for my own good but I can't help it. Reflexive. Facial knee-jerk. It's my niche. 

Here's the bloody hole in the plot line where Heero shooting me a 'Hn' and emotionlessly typing a storm on his laptop would be. 

"I finished," Heero grits out lifelessly. Like it tastes bad. 

He's framed perfectly between our two, periwinkle blue single beds, with uniform cardboard pillows, standing still and looking visibly drained and stony-faced simultaneously. Even his clothes seem tired and useless. Maybe they should just jump off. And, what else could he be sporting now but just his jeans and a tank top? Usually, he refrains from the school uniforms that we get with a tiny reluctant look. I know him so well. 

Heero secretly hates mindless uniformity, but was bred to be a soldier. So ironic, I think, that you could forge iron bullets from the very withering glances he gives those innocent clothes. 

I know him so well. 

I grin at him again, toothy and broad, as if to subtly advertise my sudden smugness. 

Nothing relays on his face to that fact, but am I discouraged by that listlessness toward our relationship? You must be joking. Right now, I could say whatever I liked in my mind, and it would never matter, smug and grinning like a fucking clown or a fool, which ever suits me for the day. Non-consequence situations are fun. 

My Colt clinks softly and Heero moves and I lounge against my cardboard pillow and reconstruct my favorite gun. Most importantly, I pop the pieces confidently into place and revel in the metallic, masculine noises they make. When I decide that I'm waist deep in way-too-idyllic sludge and I'm bored to death in this mind-numbing school, I usually resort to cleaning my gun collection I've scrounged up over the years. The whole purpose of those times is to make yourself sound as manly and gun slinging as you possibly can. Why not try to be cool? Cause when you think about it...Gundam Pilots aren't really focused on helping to increase the average life expectancy. Might as well up the standard of fashionableness. 

I know Heero is watching me from his bed, as I finish reassembling the gun and lazily cock back the hammer and fire off dry rounds. It creaks and dips slightly, silently, like a cat treading slyly on dry leaves. 

"This world is made of" I murmur to myself as I cross my legs, lifting off my scratchy pillow. I attempt a stab at the absolute inhuman Vash marksmanship I had drooled over in a Trigun manga a classmate lent to me during a particularly drab assembly and mock draw pictures in the wall. Half-dramatically, half-sloppily, I lift the Colt needlessly far out in front of me, arm straightened and shoulder high against my neck, firing little harmless clicks off in rapid succession. I even wink for good measure. "Love and Peace!" 

It's really too small to look anything like the real thing. Good God, I would have given anything for something like that man's long barrel Colt. 

A "Hn" lifts my attention over to my blue-eyed comrade. 

Okay, so maybe I underestimated the expressiveness of Heero's little grunts. This one was definitely a sneer. Nothing in the spiteful, malignant school detention monitor department, but he wasn't really pleased and if was with me or not, I wasn't sure. If he talked, I was sure I'd find out. For a second, I wonder if he's going to call me Tongari or something. 

Marble blue eyes sour and he pouts his lip in a frown, sitting on his bed, shamelessly ruffling the comforter he'd immaculately made this morning in only a cheap towel. How did I know, you ask? In the morning, let's just say, I'm always happy for a few free hentai moments and I'm an expert at faking stuff, like sleep. 

"What's up, Heero?" I ask as I causally knead the gun under the mattress. I glance up to him as I settle back down on my knees and he seems to frown more. "What's the matter? Didn't I let you get enough sleep last night?" 

An eyebrow just sinks and he grunts. Noncommittally. Wooh. God, but innuendo is just lost on this kid. The thin Japanese boy swings his legs up onto the bed and lies down face still stitched up in impatience with something and minute frown deepening. He monitors the ceiling panels faithfully as the dimming pale orange of late afternoon glows through the window and stains our room a shade of pumpkin. 

Cute, but I wish I didn't have to deal with it sometimes. I lean to the side, arching my eyebrows flatly and snorting, the tiniest little grin adorning my face. My braid swings over my shoulder and brushes against my chin. 

"Bored, huh?" 

"I guess," he grumbles, closing his eyes, sinking into the mattress listlessly. 

"Obviously, you haven't been American. We're experts at that," I say, half sarcastically. Fleeting laughter escapes me and Heero turns his head, chocolate brown bangs mildly disheveled like usual, pinning my laughter to the wall like a dart through a piece of paper. Fierce look. Very. His eyes are smoldering blue, tapered slightly upward, narrowed in an unreadable blur of beauty that I stare at very openly. Blinking innocently, I watch him stare back at me like some displeased lion rolling over the ribs of a skinny gazelle with his eyes. 

"You're American?" he asks. 

This Heero I do not know well. For God's sakes 

I just stare at him. Anvils dropping gawk. "Yeah," I answer lamely, automatically scratching at some random itch in my hair. The awkward button. Adding to my uncomfortable moment, I shrug impulsively. Should I pop some pink streamers and yell 'surprise?' 

"Oh. I didn't know." He stares blankly, looking delicious and infuriating. One day I'll kill him for that. 

"Well, yeah," I point out to him redundantly. "I am." 

Heero: Stare. 

Duo: Stare and inwardly sigh. 

Yay. More points for me. 

I laugh nervously and say, trying to kill the awkward button with my fingernails, "Don't I look like it?" The soldier mastermind blinks dumbly at me, almost as if watching a robot sprout from my brain without my knowing. Sometimes, I think I know him. Sometimes I know I know him, memorized every action and habit, and just as I'm wallowing, he'll knock me over with a club of bloated ignorance and smirk at me 

Ah, hell, who do I think I'm kidding? This is the first time he's ever surprised me like this. Annihilated my pride like this. 

Blue eyes blink again, and then he wordlessly rolls over and begins his rapport with the ceiling again. Something in me just seems to drop dead from exhaustion, like road kill straining for a grassy ditch to just die in, and I let my arms drop lifelessly to my side and I sit, just looking crotchety in his direction. 

Peachy. I ache for bitter coffee, I ache to sleep, I just want to do something now. 

Great. I've become bored and pissed off. I sneer at Heero, trying to kill the infectious thing with just a look. Sometimes, I know him too well for my own damned good and it's an ironic, tilting boat, because, he knows nothing about me. I know he knows nothing. Silently, I lift off my irritatingly blue cardboard bed and snatch up my rumpled jacket from the headboard, chinking with ammunition in the pocket. God, I feel like a cantankerous bastard. I'm acting like an old man as I snappishly put on the coat, take my Colt, and walk out the door to leave Heero to boil in his boredom, this bedroom soaked with tension. I'm sure as hell not going to with him. 

You'd think a gnashing American accent would indicate something. 


	2. Yea, Though I

Part 2

  
Yea, Though I  


  
He looks at me three days later distastefully with a brusque little growl I detect from the back of his morning-ragged throat, curling back his lip to bare his teeth, a gagging wolf effect. I can tell he hates it already, the way he shifts it around and is constantly poking at it indiscreetly when he believes I'm too busy wolfing to glance his way. Ha. I should make him wear it everyday, sexy sneering fleabag. More bitter black coffee is donated to his growling stomach, and my charity of rubber Egg McMuffins isn't doing bad, either.   
  
That stuff is going to kill you, Heero growls flatly.   
  
Blue sparks shoot my direction, over Shinegami's [1] black rims.   
  
Danger bongos drum. [2]   
  
Thanks for the sentiment, I shoot back. My teeth gleam and he winces distastefully. Gleam with plastic-tasting, slate gray, chunky meat so charmingly that I think I should grin wider, and I do. Goddamn, I love life.   
  
Though I don't plan on surviving an overly long time, especially not to let bad cholesterol literally stab me in the heart.   
  
And yet, at that thought, I still remain as freakishly happy as I've been the entire day. Mostly because when you can successfully force-feed your foxy brunette, taciturn best friend your homeland's plastic junk food and then dress his pretty face with your favorite sun killing shades, it's considered a victory of sorts. I do, and I decided early this morning I would get plastered, disappointingly found no booze in the area, and settled for McDonald's for the romantic persuasion power I need to sweep Heero off his feet. I grin broadly repeatedly as I suck on my sugary beverage and slurp around in the shredded ice cubes. Mornings like these are gorgeous, rain splattering on the glass doors in waterfall sheets and artificial, stark butter yellow lights glowing overhead, hot food in my belly, Heero in glossy black sunglasses   
  
If only Solo could see me now.   
  
He'd be slapping me on the back, of course! I grin again.  
  
  


  
Solo... your face... it's all red.   
  
It's musty and dark in here, a suffocating kind of black that inflicts instant claustrophobia in even short, niche-loving street rats like myself. Black that hums and sings above my head like distant trains and machines whirring. Before I can even look up to him again, hunched lithely on the crate taller than myself, his gruff, dirty, familiar hand is buried in my hair and fiercely tousling it in his characteristic display of affection. He scratches at my head desperately, needing badly, kneading his fingers through my greasy brown hair and I freeze for a second. He's reassuring me along with himself. I didn't understand back then. Usually, he would smile warmly at me -- too warm, I realized later, for a doomed street rat with any reasoning left could have ever without driving himself mad. He would smile at me, because he said I was a chance for the future and I gave him hope. I always smiled back.   
  
Yo, Duo. Grungy fingers shove my bangs in my eyes. I still can't see him, forced to gaze at the splintering wooden crate stamped with smudged green ink. I hear him grinning. He's happy to see me, but something tells me he really didn't want to just yet. What'cha doing here so late? Need some water?   
  
Naw, s'okay, I refuse, mumbling. The hand in my hair, just scratching and petting, gets old. I swat it away and pout my lip, glaring up at him. He looks skinny, weak, and ratty crouched on the rice crate, but he's so perfect to me. Solo, why's your face red like that? You should be sleeping!   
  
Lit by a singular yellow streetlamp leaking through the broken warehouse boards, he turns his head away and rubs at his face.   
  
I whine and stomp my foot. What's w'ong?   
  
He perks up and grins at me, scruffy gray-brown hair swirling around his eyes. Girl troubles, Duo, he announces happily, like it's no big deal. Mangled fabric swishes and he's standing jauntily next to me on the cold concrete, elbowing me playfully in the shoulder. You don't need to worry bout girls, though, they'll just flock to you, kiddo. You're real cute.   
  
Girl t'oubles?   
  
He leads me out of his hiding place, greasy arm slung around my shoulder; it's his sanctuary that he likes to retreat to every Friday since we settled down in the junkyard.   
  
Yeah, Duo. T'oubles. He laughs.   
  
I yank at his shirt. Like what?   
  
Oh, this pretty girl and I, he says, nonchalantly. His green eyes turn wistful, skyward, and meet with rusty metal beams. We're not exactly meant to see each other, if you know what I mean. His eyes are sad, no grin left in his expression. It hurt me. A lot, but I felt like I could have stopped it somehow, like a small stone on a butterfly's wing, just heavy enough not to be pushed off alone.   
  
What happened, Solo? You're sad, I lament quietly, eyes glued to him. I suppose I wanted to protect him despite being two feet shorter and years younger, I wanted to pay him back, help him like he'd done to help me.   
  
He laughs at that. It's okay, Duo. Another hand buries in my bushy hair. She and I just can't be friends anymore because she's moving.  
  
  
  
Her daddy doesn't like me. Doesn't want me to play with her anymore.   
  
that's s-s-stupid! You don't have a daddy! He should be nice to you!   
  
Laughter. Cool, liquid black air, an alleyway scattered with green trash bags. I know, he probably should, but he doesn't have to. He's very powerful.   
  
He's not an o'phan, huh? I grouse, crabby at the fact someone is mean to my best friend carelessly, for stupid reasons.   
  
He laughs. I really amused him back then. Aw, Duo, you don't have to worry about me. You should think about the girl you're going to have someday.   
  
I squeak, almost terrified. I jerk to a stop and splatter him with a raspberry. Yuck! They just pull my hair and giggle and stuffs! No way!   
  
Soaked in blackness and rail thin, Solo pauses in his fluid, catlike movements and stares back at me, green eyes blank for a second. Something flickers in his gaze and he slings his arm around me again, this time warmer and more comforting than casual and roughhousing. It's cold in the alley and I'm still tattered up from the day's scrounging for food and playing with metal scraps, so I sink into his side as he guides me quietly towards our junkyard.   
  
Well, I hope you can find someone nice, Duo.   
  
I sulk. I really hated that girl comment.   
  
Who won't pull your hair.  
  
I sulk harder. [3]  
  
I hope you do better than me, Solo warns affectionately, rubbing my shoulder. No matter if they're an asshole. He laughs.   
  


  
  
My memory fades out quickly, a delightful little sight patched in in its place. Confident that I'm still chewing and gazing at my tray in deep reflection, Heero is fidgeting almost gracelessly with my black shades, unknowingly under voyeuristic eyes.  
  
He hates them. I love it.   
  
He's also staring balefully at some cumbersome old guy shoving the hamburger into his mouth like it's about to struggle and run away, fingering the thin black rim over his nose. Furrowing his eyebrow. Arching his lip. Gagging Wolf, revisited in all its glory. I'm sipping out of my paper cup again, intermittently going through my assorted foods while I watch him, and I smile against the straw. Almost like he's about to whip out his gun and fire the damned meat out of them man's hand and proceed to Dirty Harry' the thing to death.   
  
Shoot hamburgers first, ask questions later.   
  
He's cute when he wants to kill.   
  
I know better than be caught and I'm again digging into my breakfast as he turns back. Nothing seems to please him in this place, it seems. Thin, aggravated lines dash between his eyebrows as I shove some mushy hash browns into my mouth. Always room. I'm glancing up at him between his intense, incensed glares at me, then his intense, incensed glares at my food, and his intense, incensed glares at aforementioned Grubby Guy. It's actually quite easy to space them and find moments to watch him without getting burned by the ferocity of his eyes. I know him so well. Well, at least for today. Lately, I don't know just in general.   
  
He's like a brand new horse with old age arthritis or something. Yeah, that mystifying.   
  
Or at least a pitcher.   
  
Egg McMuffin. Warm and mashed in my mouth, followed instantly by a dashing of cold orange pop and a poor substitute for orange juice, followed by more plastic meat and muffin.   
  
A baseball pitcher.   
  
Grudgingly, I watch with baited eyes as Heero snatches up his coffee cup and watch the burning steam practically rise from his fingers as the hot porcelain fries them.   
  
A hot baseball pitcher.   
  
There's black dirt in his knuckles. Standard of soldier boy.   
  
A hot, dirty baseball pitcher.  
  
Grease from 01's intricate innards. Stolen innards.   
  
A hot, dirty baseball pitcher, robbing me blind.   
  
Although I hated to admit, my Heero persuasion skills sadly do have their limit, and it was the inability to disarm him in a McDonald's that smashed my nose into the cement. And ground it in. You know, a few times for good measure. I can hear the sound of his shoulder holster moving ever so slightly under his jacket and militant green tank top.   
  
A hot, dirty baseball pitcher, robbing me blind, killing the ump on the side.   
  
I laugh at that thought. I laugh. Visibly at him. Oh crap.   
  
He's now staring at me, despised sunglasses in pocket, all his baleful contempt for this place of cheap, over-salted hell directed at me in a little package called a death glare. Blazing blue. Hey, what did I ever do deserve it for? Well, I don't think I'll ever know. I just know I'm in for a bomb of some sort as I purse my lips around the straw and cut off the laughter almost violently.   
  
A hot dirty baseball pitcher robbing me blind, killing the ump, and aiming flaming curveballs straight at my face.   
  
Oh right.   
  
I dragged him here in the first place.   
  
As I look up to his face, my own maw stuffed with half-chewed warm, yellowish, greenish scrambled eggs, I realize just how pissed off he is. No problem. I think.   
  
Yea, though I walk through the valley of death.   
  
Hey, what's up, Hee-chan?   
  
Oh shit. I can hear blood vessels bursting and screaming in pain as his eyebrows dig furiously together faster than his trigger finger annihilates an Oz soldier.   
  
Heero, it's Heero! I meant Heero! NO! I didn't just do that!   
  
Leather swishes against green tank top fabric with the faint metallic ping of a fully loaded and fully operational gun to boot. Something blue darkens. Oh, yeah. Those are my companion's pretty blue eyes, I think dreadfully in the haze that is now my panicky brain, not the hateful glare of a demon. My fingers clench around my orange pop. I also think, when did I become such a pant-pisser?   
  
Yea, though I walk through the valley of death God damn it, what's the last part again?   
  
  
  
I don't dare answer. My orange-flavored lips glue fiercely together.   
  
Yea, though I Yea, though I   
  
I'm staring wide-eyed at his tanned, cute little mulatto-Asian face, soaking in the charismatic glow his emotionless blue eyes radiate, and I'm sure I'm going to be injured once we step foot away from any possible witness to my bloody slaughter. I'm melting from the spite he reeks.   
  
Yea, though I Yea   
  
  
  
Outside. Now. We're leaving. He snorts condescendingly, abandoning his plain coffee, steaming into the yellow-tinted air, as he disappears from my fearful line of sight. I gaze at the rain-splattered window, muddled with a hazy grey, sluggish sky, until I finally realize I'm not in pain or dead yet, which is a surprise, estimating from just how royally angry he was when I dragged him here. Angry, at cheap American junk food. Angry, of an absent mission. Angry, at me. Angry, at me for dealing with it so casually. Angry, that the only obscuring article of clothing I had to hide his identity from possible recognition or attack was my sunglasses. Angry, at Shinegami.   
  
Yea, though I walk through the valley of death...  
  
Everything again blurs. I hate it when that happens. But it always does. When I follow Heero, watching the muscles tense in his back for an attack, or just putting up an indifferent, levelheaded façade, everything around me is gone. No world. Just me, and him, a soldier. There is no mundane happy life, no fleeting moments of childhood to snatch out of the air, the intangible, fleeting flow of life. It all just dies and rots around little oblivious, godly me... An inevitable evil, I muse ironically and briefly think about the cold metal of my cross necklace against my chest.   
  
Indistinct colors and blurs and cool mists and winds that claw at the outside of me numbly just hang limply around me, dead, floating in the water. Warm, sluggish peach-colored blurs shift mill around me—people. I mechanically stand and dispose of the garbage, before I slink noiselessly out the door, an anonymous gray shadow of Shinigami.   
  
The rain is really cold today. And so is Heero.   
  
So. No. Big. Difference.   
  
I shall fear no evil...  
  
Slicked with rain, he stares at me, blue eyes flat and misty in the gray light, quiet and stoic and dependable as always, maddening and perversely enchanting as always. The slim brunette is poised, commandeered car door ajar, like a flesh figurine. Sometimes I think I know him, I think with a dull arbitrary grin that aches on my face. Soaked, my sneakers slush of their own accord through the puddles toward him, taking me with.   
  
  
  
Heero looks at me, and then slides effortlessly into the driver seat.   
  
I am   
  
Inside, it's frigid. The rain streaks like tears, swallowing the glass up. I buckle up and draw a barbed glance from my comrade for it. Neutral. That's what I am back to him. I only wanted to have a moment of life with Heero, with any other living, breathing thing, outside of the swirling black sand trap that is this prideful, bloated war and my warped life. The only reason I felt so happy was because I felt so small and average, just eating cheap breakfast with my friend.   
  
Heero snorts, displeased with the drained expression I cling to, and looks away distantly, jerking the car out of neutral and into drive, but I'm still stuck. [4]  
  
the meanest son of a bitch in the valley   
  
In neutral, with him.   
  
That's the way it has to be.   
  
I am Shinigami

  
  
[1] Japanese for Goddess of Death. It's tradition to name someone's favorite possessions like cars, boats, or guns girl names, so I thought that Shinegami would be appropriate for Duo's sunglasses. Not me. I do boys' name. There are NO female items in my universe. Joe, Bob, Moe, Larry Heels named Simon and Chris, cheap lime green sandals named Kenshin, cheap black sandals named Wolfwood, a punk bracelet which is actually part of my soul named Guang Tong Sid, a crappy watch named Fudgepacker... you name it.  
  
[2] Just a little humorous soundtrack. Remember George of the Jungle with Brandon Fraiser? The gorillas had bongos they pounded to send messages and stuff? These bongos just mean danger', kay? I think he could really play Duo pretty well in a movie.   
  
[3] Say that five times fast3 around your grandma.  
  
[4] Okay, I KNOW cars are not parked in neutral – They are parked in Park', thus the apt name – but it's only for theatrical purposes. Please don't throw grammar bombs at me, I chafe easily!


	3. Sex Machine, Hate Machine

Part 3

  
Sex Machine, Hate Machine  
  
  
You know how in every movie you've ever seen, the sex-kitten character, the swanky woman in a scandalous, arrest-me-red dress always storms the room and glides past the main characters in liquid slow motion, usually dripping with sleazy ZZ Top guitar riffs? Well, I'd say Heero's theme song is a roaring anthem done by spasmodic heroin junkie guitarists fresh off a bubbling hot batch of black tar. That, or an aggravated mountain grizzly bear. I grin awkwardly in the harsh blue skeletons of light streaming in the dark room, grasping just how fucked up and mildly psychotic my possible last thoughts are. I need to do something, I feel pinned like a raccoon under a squealing tire when he glares like this. But as soon as I realize how much angrier it makes him, I regret ever having facial muscles. It's like red-hot coals under a gargoyle's ass, instantaneous and brutal.   
  
The door rattles dangerously as Heero's fist lunges down on the brass doorknob and slams the door shut like an incensed demon would throw a human body against a wall. The beam of dim yellow light outside in the hallway like a last beacon dies along with the image of Wufei's injured shadow limping indignantly to his room. I can still hear Quatre's voice soothing the battered, moderately bloody Latin pilot, our precious stoic Trowa, as he slumps bodily against him like a sack of dead potatoes. Their voices drift away, like butterflies whirling away from the spark of a malicious fire. Smart butterflies. The peace in here doesn't last long, either.   
  
What the hell were you thinking? Anger and hellfire roar in my brain.   
  
No, wait; it's just Heero's voice viciously growling at me, just loathing enough to sprout a malignant tumor. The slim brunette glares at me, face set in a taut grimace, eyebrows furrowing despite the large, strawberry red gash running a long vicious line across his temple and around the crook of his grinding jaw that's just now scabbing over. An hour before, it was a torrent of thick cherry red down the entire left side of his face, clotting in his eyelashes and hair. The nausea and dizziness must have been hellish, even for a soldier. Let alone a soldier in a sweltering dark cockpit being incessantly thrown against the metal consoles like a bag of bones from attacks and as blind as a bat. Unfortunately, Wufei and I, infiltrating the computer control room, ran into a hair-trigger lieutenant lagging behind to combat our decoy team currently slicing suits, leaving Quatre, Trowa, and Heero to fend off the war dogs for another twenty minutes before we could haul our asses out of there. Ten minutes by itself can be the difference between scabbed knees and a bloodbath massacre.   
  
Heero had taken the vicious blunt of the onslaught, scorching off all but his armor in the process, causing temperatures to shame even nasty hellfire in his cockpit and frying his monitors into blithering, sparking slabs.   
  
(Like the damn hero he is.)   
  
And so, in pitch black, he had slashed through the suits dog piling him, with the worse intent to kill, single-handedly, and come out swinging, trying to slice the every damned scrap of metal, bleeding profusely and with an animal glint in his shadowed eyes that sickened me to my stomach to see.   
  
It was the sick war souvenir of the week.   
  
Glancing fearfully at him, my spine arched into the arbitrary table in my room in surprise, I can see spots of red still caked into his angular collarbone. My eyes, painfully wide, lock onto his face, daring not the slightest to enrage such a loose firing pin. Blue ones burn me down. Answer me, Duo! the Japanese pilot snarls, dilated pupils like black holes that suck all the audacity out of me. Oh, crap. He's close. I've just noticed.   
  
Someone coughs in the second story, spooking my gaze from that angry, beautiful face.   
  
Nervously, my fingers dig into the old, yielding soft wood table jabbing me and I cling to my scraps of nerves that haven't abandoned the Maxwell ship and suddenly remember. Hallelujah.   
  
I was saving you, that's what! I shoot back snappishly, feeling all too insolent and inclined to raise my voice to him, stare at his beautiful rage. When the Japanese pilot shifts backward slightly for whatever reason I hungrily pounce on the inch he relents like a dog. I'm angry. I don't care what you think about what I did, I at least know it wasn't wrong! Bitch at me all you like, it's never wrong to save a human life. I saved your stupid ass!  
  
Sloe blue eyes... those insane, undecipherable things, for an instant, turn pale and confused, rimmed with stunned white.   
  
Good Lord who art in heaven... I've actually left him speechless!  
  
****Okay, now let's move onto a game called Scenes From a Hat (assorted cheers from audience hailing the game) for Trowa, Quatre, Heero and Duo. (performers automatically rise from their chairs and walk down towards their appointed steps on opposing sides of the stage in pairs.) If you're not familiar with this game, before the show we ask the audience to write down suggestions that they'd like to see acted out and put the good ones in this hat and the performers have to try to act them out.  
  
(shot of Trowa and Quatre, and Heero and Duo prepping as Wufei draws from the upturned American top hat.)  
  
...Bad times to celebrate too early. Go ahead.  
  
(Duo steps down into the center of the stage, Heero following mutually.)  
  
Heero: [pauses.]  
  
Duo: [pauses, looking blankly at his partner, then yells.] I saved your stupid ass!  
  
Heero: [pauses, looking surprised, then bashes him into the wall.] *****  
  
I crumble helplessly under his fist and take the vicious fire that is his knuckles slashing me as I stagger back. It's black and swirling blue as my teeth squeal and whine for mama. I recover hazily, sprawled on a mahogany table without a scrap of pride left to my name by now. Luckily, the door is closed, otherwise someone would have heard the pathetic yelp I emit as the raging Japanese pilot seemingly gets ready to attack me again, head bowed slightly and face hidden. Wood squeals as well as Heero jolts the table viciously and leaves me unharmed for a second. He growls to himself and then backs off with a shaky step, still radiating red-hot waves of undiluted aggression like an open stove.  
  
I ask, half-undaunted still, my leg hanging off the table in a damsel fashion.  
  
You were acting so stupidly, endangering the mission that way! he snaps, dishing another vicious, almost immature whiplash to the table. He no longer acts the mysterious, fickle lit fuse; he glares forthright at me. You could have screwed up the entire initiative! Do you have any idea what you were doing?   
  
Every word is like poison dripping from his lip. Mission-driven, heartless asshole poison.  
  
Yeah, I do! I retort, climbing to my feet brashly, although I would be infuriated if it's suddenly illegal to just stand myself up in His almighty Soldier's presence. Great. I even stagger as my clothes catch on the wooden table and I testily rip it off the corner. Ignoring the look of mild frustration and surprise, I brush past him and head to go check up on my injured comrades, the ones who haven't set their sights on incurring damnation for me helping them.  
  
I've decided to let the first punch go.   
  
By the time he shoves me I'm in the red and nothing but Sister Helen herself will stop me from throwing any scraps of good religion left in me to the wind and smacking Heero back. A forceful hand locks my shoulder against the cold wall, and I'm glaring angrily up at my captor like he just ran over a little poodle and left it to bleed to death, like he's a piece of shit. And honestly, he is right now. I thought I knew him... Bodily hunching in the effort to pin me and hissing short, strained breaths through the thin, dangerous gap between his teeth, Heero nearly snarls his words so badly I barely understand him, drilling me into the wall.  
  
Listen to me.  
  
I guess I have to, now don't I? Since someone, I hiss back, taken up in the moment with my American temper --damn my New New York roots-- just fucking slammed me into my wall and I can't even touch the ground!  
  
Heero's eyes flash and he angrily whips his fist at his side. No, Duo, shut up and listen to me! I've seen this thin, deceivingly waifish boy snap steel like pencils during boring math lectures, so when the fire in his blue eyes flares, I decide to abide and seal my lips shut. Acid pain shoots through my shoulder as short nails dig in. You didn't follow your orders and threw yourself recklessly in and became a liability for us all! What the hell were you thinking!  
  
I don't know Heero! I mock. My eyebrows furrow dangerously, watching the blue skeletons of light pale his face. Equally drawn and taut as mine must be, only streaked with faded red. I'm sorry I didn't let you die! I'm sorry I took any fucking bullet for you! Huh, is that it? You jealous of death?!  
  
Jesus, I'm yelling loud.  
  
Japanese eyes narrow, a precarious, trapped anger flittering behind them. Tighter grip, more pain. he hisses.  
  
  
  
Loose tongue will be the death of me, but anger rolls so sweetly out the mouth. I thunder on, like a derailed, flaming train.  
  
I don't know why the fuck I'd want to save my friends! I see now how weak and imperfect it is to ever help anyone, oh thank you Heero Yuy, for showing me the light! I rant, every syllable climbing dangerously closer to an enraged, chaotic shriek. Thundering adrenaline and blood begin to distort my brain, and each frame of an incensed Heero throttling me is opposed by another of Solo, beautiful green-eyed Solo, slowly rotting in a dirty, worthless junkyard. Strings in my heart already slashed and torn, bleeding by a splinter thread wrench tightly. I hate him. You want to die, Heero?  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Fucking liar!  
  
  
  
Even if they're an asshole, huh, Solo? I shriek and simultaneously claw at the Wing pilot's wrist, now sinking into dementia. Limply, I loll my neck to face toward heaven. Everything is black. I'm alone with my demons and they laugh as I claw at them in vain. Green-eyed demons. Well, that's what I have right here! A fucking liar who wants to die! Ha ha ha ha!  
  
  
  
Wants to! What an idiot he is!  
  
Duo! Stop it!  
  
If only he knew huh, Solo! Huh, Solo?!  
  
  
  
He must realize how foolish he is! I laugh, hysterically, hot salt smearing my dimmed vision, lacing red pain withering my senses. 'Duo' he says! But he doesn't fucking know, Solo! He doesn't know that he's tempting death, flirting with Shinigaimi! I was never really Duo!  
  
  
  
I'm always Death!  
  
Your name is Duo!  
  
I'm nothing! I have nothing to prove! I am Death! You died, Solo! He'll die!  
  
You're Duo Maxwell!  
  
He wants me to be Shinigami! He embraces death by denying my help, by denying my genuine fucking help! I hate him! I hate him! I'm wailing shamelessly. I can smell it again, in the blood traces left on Heero's forehead, caked in his hair. Blood and death. I can taste Solo rotting.   
  
I don't want to be Shinigami! He knows nothing about me when I know everything about him! Why does Heero want that, Solo?! Blood leaks beneath my fingertips.  
  
I don't!  
  
Shinigami can only kill! I choke.   
  
Duo... Please!  
  
I fucking tried not to kill Heero! I tried! I tried to do what you said! I can't love him, I'll kill him! I sob, anemically clawing a quivering hand. Please come back, Solo!  
  
Stop it Duo, you're scaring me!!  
  
With that the violins playing the dramatic C minor music snap and I unceremoniously clatter to the floor like a disowned Pinnocio doll, blood flaring in my nostrils. I feel thunder vibrating through my bones, cheek flattened into the cold, chipping wooden floor, and the golden light returns, burning on my face before reality fractures. Lying there, stained by blood but not quite bleeding. Then I grasp it's a magazine emptying into the floorboards, slicing my calves. Time is freezing as the butterflies return to the scattering ashes of dead orphans.


	4. Mmmm, Mmmm, Good

Chapter 4

"Mmmm, Mmmm, Good"

  
  
Normally, after a token fight in an angst-ridden drama film, the victim will remain unconscious until morning and wake clean and unjolted in a sunny room. Well... that's crap. My sweet, unadulterated trip through blackness is interrupted violently when metal tweezers dive, dive, dive into my leg and my spooked scraps of good religion scramble back to me in a frenzy, so that I whimper very loudly and arch up against the warm thing restraining me. Warm pink thing with tinges of blonde hair tussled in my eyes, chin in a vice against my skull, warm arms slicing off the circulation, pinning me to a surprisingly forceful Quatre. I suck in a deep breath, whirling in a black slur of sensations. Acid pain and seemingly icy cold blood stringing along my leg. Violin rosin, gunpowder flooding my nose... and oh yeah, Wufei's sticking metal tweezers that obviously don't belong in my leg like a perverse fork in a drumstick.  
  
Eat up, bastards.  
  
I annimalistically growl something to the effect of Fuck you, as I slam my skull against Quatre's chin and he grunts in pain. Instantly, I regret my pained thrashing. In my haze, I know enough to realize I've just headbutted the little blonde one, and sure enough, angry, protective hands clamp on my shoulders and vice until my shoulders feel like a clownish balloon pinched by giant bloody tweezers.  
  
All I smell is antiseptic and blood. All I feel is the ache that I'm going to die one day, damned if I could discern dusk or dawn in my brain, and pain. Three pilots converging on a bloody cesspool that is me, wherever they laid me out, moodily smoking cigarettes of inner demons. Proverbial smoke of angst drifting nonchalantly, whorishly through each other's war pocked lungs.   
  
What a happy homecoming.   
  
... never... ever...  
  
Heero's not here.   
  
... shot... he's never... that's so...  
  
... Yuy needs... that's all... snap... acceptable...  
  
... was scared... Death?  
  
... what is... head, Duo?  
  
I'd be rotten worm filth by now if he were.  
  
I'm sorry, I rasp scratchily and involuntarily as soothing, callused hands ruffle my scruffy hair affectionately. Whether or not I'm grumbling incoherently, whether or not I'm even speaking, it doesn't matter. Aches just drain away when an angel like Quatre comforts you. Thank God for Quatre. Thank sweet, laughing God...  
  
In hindsight, I was flitting carelessly through consciousness then, visited by darkness and glimpses of misty dreaming sleep equally. Hot and acid still roared up my leg, dulled by liberal shots of painkiller and disinfectant. Not that I was seriously injured... just severely depressed, to be correct. Swirling in blackness tormented by green eyes and blue ones didn't help me to get over the fact every shitting thing was doing handstands and kicking dirt in my eyes that day. I've killed and they are killing, so does it have to chalk up against me?  
  
Why did I say that? Why did I say that? Why did I say that? I bash my brain, interrogating myself, wrenching at each poor, wretched cell that ever willed me to say those things to the stone cold Heero Yuy with the bottomless blue eyes that spit at sentimentality in their metallic prowess and efficiency.   
  
I'm a stupid Shinigami.  
  
** Ch-chink **  
  
I wake up instantly at some recognizable alien noise. I've been trained to the noises of guns and treading feet.   
  
And enter Heero.  
  
  
  
I was curled up fiercely into the scraps that were my blanket, wedged in my little spot beneath a half-buried, bare-boned car frame covered with a tarp, the last time I saw the Solo I thought I knew. It was seconds before his ever-present, brotherly, catlike smile slowly drifted away from his face and he just left. Quietly stood from his bed and walked from the junkyard, leaning over to the side and resting breathlessly on occasion. He didn't believe that I had been awake when he decided to leave like an animal looking for a place to die quietly, or at least he didn't expect it. Because when I staggered out of bed, dragging my blanket noiselessly behind me, watching him walk bowlegged and shake violently, and he realized someone was behind him, he jumped, letting out a keening noise of pain and terror like a trapped, panicking animal. Then, I suppose, he never even saw who was following him, because his heart, which had been weakened to the point it was no better than raw hamburger by the plague, simply exploded and he dropped.  
  
You see... Solo had never told me he was sick.  
  
I thought I had known him.  
  
  
  
Although it's really Trowa who quietly opens the door in consideration I might still need my sleep, there's a sensation of blood and silent adrenaline that lingers behind him even after he nudges it shut that tells me that Heero's there in the blackness, waiting. Like the soldier he is. Staking out his target ruthlessly, selflessly, endlessly, all in the name of the precious initiative. His presence is enthralling in a deathly, sort of stalker-movie fashion. Even as I feel the weight and heat of a porcelain soup bowl in my hands and vaguely take in the stoic, chiseled planes of the Latin boy's face looking me solemnly in the eyes, I feel a certain paranoia welling up in the back of my mind that obsesses me beyond sanity.  
  
I can feel Heero waiting for his chance.  
  
But a bloody quilt pressed over my raw, screaming legs reminds me of just what he's waiting to do—Lecture me until I once again snap for the opportunity to shoot me up again.   
  
Time to forget. I huffily snatch up the tiny spoon clattering around the edge of the bowl with as much sulking anger I can produced out of a drained body and proceed to stuff my face with the piquant, warm stew Quatre has made for me. Less than politely I might add. Hot soup trails down the crease of my lips half-obscenely and I eat furiously, almost ready to dig out my own tongue with aforementioned spoon if it'll distract me for a fraction of an instant from that intoxicating, killer presence hanging outside the door.   
  
Trowa shakes his head. The bed dips and a forceful, but scolding gentle hand presses against the rim of the soup bowl, preventing me from burying my face, my grief, my aggression in the warm broth and noodles like some starving urchin, like how the urchin I used to love would do. I glare pointedly at the brunette Latin boy when his hand doesn't move. Pretentious fucking hand. No matter how much I am bonded with these soldiers, they still know how to royally piss me off effortlessly. How dare he, I snarl in my brain. My face contorts sourly, whipping out of my control. Sad, sad imitation of the death glare.   
  
  
  
Ah, what? I growl testily.   
  
Trowa Barton gazes quietly at me, regarding me like a book printed in baby talk – carefully, slowly, like I'm so fucking brittle, yet all with a tiny leer in his eyes.  
  
I ask defensively.  
  
There it is. A smirk. That bastard.  
  
What do you want, Trowa? I'm snapping now. I offhandedly slurp up a noodle dangling from the corner of my lips.  
  
There is a liquid amount of skepticism and mild amusement glazed over those emerald green eyes and an eyebrow arched at my expense. As if he's been living only to deliver this line, he says simply, Please, Duo, stop getting your panties in a bunch.  
  
I instantly choke on my soup.  
  
It's making everybody else tired. The weight becomes absent from the mangy cot. Trowa's hand vacates itself from my soup bowl and I try and jerk it away first, immaturely, uselessly, splashing some hot soup on the bloodied up quilt.  
  
Just talk to Heero.  
  
  
  
Trowa scolds monotonously, dark green eyes searing stoically across my face like the sting of blame. Hell, they are the stings of Blame.  
  
I'm just not ready to deal with a homicidal rock today, I growl back, teeth grinding in the back of my mouth. I don't know want to know what the fuck's wrong with him that would make him fucking shoot me—I don't even know what the fuck's going on in my own head!  
  
I feel concern burn along the ridges of my face. Pity. Dammit, I hate my mouth. Such a flaming train wreck, rolling on in chaos.  
  
Besides, that psycho hair-trigger and I need our space, otherwise we'll only kill each other! He fucking shot me! You want that to happen again? I have the obligation to scream this at him, anger constricting like venomous warmth in my throat and my arms wrapped in a vice grip around the soup bowl until the hot porcelain sears at my flesh.  
  
Duo, please. I flinch at the tone of his voice. His cinnamon-colored eyebrows arch upward, digging together in angst ever so slightly. Infuriating. Everything is. Duo, listen to me. You don't understand the situation.  
  
The hell I do! I yell back.   
  
I manage a weak glare of chipping daggers up at the brunette's semi-bothered face before he brushes it off like dull butter knives, striking his back harmlessly. My eyes flame furiously, my teeth grind until I taste the metallic wash of blood haunting my mouth.  
  
No one bosses Duo Maxwell, except...  
  
[[Du-chan, come on, buddy. Your garbage soufflé is getting cold.]]  
  
Green eyes, a foreign shade of pine green slash one more time across my face, fuming darkly and quietly, before Trowa sighs listlessly. They leave blame in every inch of me until it burns and I frown deeply. He mimics it solemnly. he lies. And on that note, he leaves, melting into the shadow of the dusky dim cellar room. The heavy wooden, metal-trimmed door closes—  
  
** Ch-chink. **  
  
And is bolted.  
  
I'm gagging on a wandering piece of chicken. Warm noodles still dangle from my lips like limp, dead octopi. I feel so damned dignified right now, I'd flick the Queen of England off and just giggle femininely into my palm.   
  
The air is cold and laden with dust and dirt particles, an old abandoned and unfortunately empty wine cellar we found beneath our current safehouse. Dark and musty. Like cold, malicious fingers around your neck as you breathe, constantly. Nightmare cold. Arctic starlight cold and malicious in it's absolute silence. Despite the warm porcelain bowl steaming in my lap, I feel a sharp chill arch through my bones almost immediately as I hear the rusty metal lock into place. Unmovable. Unbreakable. Constant. Perfect. Frighteningly perfect.  
  
As cheesy as it sounds, I need Trowa back, I need a warm human closeness in this anonymous, cold dark room, and I sniffle harshly, angry with myself and rubbing my knuckles roughly against my eye. I sniffle wetly, hot dashes of soup splattered across my cheekbones and chin.  
  
I thought I knew him.   
  
I thought I knew him.  
  
I really though I did; I thought I was the deceptive one, with this damned whorish grin—A whorish, shallow grin flashed at the drop of a dime like a circus attraction veil falls. Goddamnit... I scrape viciously at my face, skin burning, until I begin to almost scratch myself bloody, overwhelmed by a black pit gaping in my brain that sucks all the sanity and self-control from me. And soon, it's not all just homemade chicken noodle soup stinging down my face. I feel so damn selfish and wretched at the same time... I don't want to eat the warm soup in my lap anymore, I don't even want to recognize light or colors or shapes. I want to be blind and dumb. I just want to starve and forget like a bastard puppy. I want oblivion.  
  
[[Du-chan, come on]]  
  
So I quickly fall into dreams of black and green.  



	5. StAiN lIfE

Chapter 5 

"StAiN lIfE"  


  
[6:59 PM]  
  
Du-chan, buddy, come on. Your garbage soufflé is getting cold.   
  
I'm comin', Solo!   
  
Tiny, greasy fingers wrapped around a metal bar protruding from a large, disorganized clutter of metal and old mattresses and boxes and a tiny, greasy little boy climbed up the junk pile, tattered sneakers easily finding purchase like a cat, and flopped on top of the crowning, faded blue mattress. Around him, the shadowed-gray, sharp-edged expanse of the junkyard spanned out beneath a magenta Colony sunset.   
  
A thin brunette, sitting and waiting cross-legged upon the mattress with two, scrappy halves of a submarine sandwiches brandished in each hand, grinned at the little longhaired urchin. Chunks of lettuce and tomatoes and deli-sliced ham and turkey flopped enticingly around the edges on pristine slices of white bread, as trails of tomato juice and Italian sauce leaked down his wrists. Solo's green eyes gleamed happily as he offered one toward Duo, his smile insanely wide and toothy.   
  
Voila. Dinner is served.  
  
Oh my gosh! R'weal food! The little orphan gaped, violet-blue eyes white rimmed in amazement and dirt-smudged jaw dropped, and threw himself at his best friend. Thanks so much, Solo!  
  
Solo grinned awkwardly down at the disheveled brown hair burrowing happily into his chest as bony arms squeezed the air from his lungs affectionately. Heh, you're welcome little buddy! Cold, dripping trails of sauce began to run down his arms and he laughed nervously.   
  
Now, come on Duo, dig in before I'm tempted to eat it all!  
  
  
  
  
[---]  
  
  
[Previous; 4:03 AM.]  
  
  
Solo lifted his sleep-heavy head in the sweltering silence as quietly as an urchin living as long as he had on the street would have, as noiselessly as the faint memory of a ghost. His scraggly gray brown bangs clouded in his eyes, although they were useless in the pitch black of the junkyard at night, and he blinked drowsily into the blackness, questioning the night. He didn't have to wait long before the sound that had stirred him awake came again, striking at his chest in anguish. Solo's eyes widened silently, flopping his bed-disheveled hair roughly into unruly place and eyebrows furrowing deeply in the blackness. The lanky war orphan tossed the blanket off his back and bolted up on his grungy makeshift bed and trotted barefooted through the dirt toward the little whimpering bundle curled helplessly in the corner of an old, dilapidated calico couch that was his friend.   
  
oh, Duo, don't cry  
  
it hurts r'weally bad   
  
The older orphan's heart twisted in his ribs painfully as he knelt noiselessly beside Duo, his grimy palm resting on his back and tentatively rubbing to calm his pained sobs. In the black, traces of distant, murky-blue light danced across the little orphan's long, tangled chestnut hair as he curled into a shivering ball, head jabbed between the cushions. Solo's face drew into a taut, massively concerned frown.   
  
Oh Duo, I'm sorry the brunette whispered.   
  
The little orphan only whimpered and clenched his bony arms around his constricting empty stomach even tighter.  
  
So Solo curled up with him on the couch and quietly, gently put his fingers under the waif's armpits and lifted the sobbing bag of bones and pressed him like an infant against his chest, curling his knees up. His little boy once filled with bubbly, infectious, wonderfully innocent personality was now only consumed by the bare-boned needs of animal survival and pain and the horror that a human mind can grasp with the fact of starving, a slow, tortuous death composed of a thousand little deaths. Instantly, those emaciated arms clawed at his sides and the little urchin buried his face deeply into Solo's neck. As hot tears scratched at the edges of his eyes, the Solo buried his nose in the top of Duo's knotted chestnut hair, holding down his own pain from surfacing.   
  
But he was good at it. He was older. He'd starved longer.   
  
But Duo Duo was only a little boy!  
  
I know times are tough, but can Solo stumbled and choked, trying to force out a confidant, sanguine big brother voice that just didn't exist anymore. There was nothing he could truly promise his virtuous little grinning Duo. Can you be a big boy for Solo?  
  
Duo whined, struck by another strong hunger pain and keening pathetically in the dark.  
  
  
  
Solo was amazed at how calm he sounded despite the rocky tone of voice. Hell, he wasn't even a thousandth that sure they'd even make it through the week, how he'd be able to feed this famished waif of a boy soon enough to see his charming smile again before he fell victim to nature's vicious cycle.  
  
I can't, Solo.  
  
**Solo, I'm sorry. I just can'tyou know, blood is thicker than water ya know?**  
  
** understand, Marie it's perfectly understandable.**  
  
**Hey, I'm sorry, Solo, I really am!**  
  
****  
  
**Don't look like that I do mean it! I wish I could stay, I would in an instant! I don't care if I get sick from staying on this colony, I love you. Solo, please!**  
  
**I knowYou should get going.**  
  
She had left, by the crew claws of fate and goddamned hierarchy, and now  
  
I don't wanna. I wanna not be hungry anymore  
  
And now, Duohis wonderful little Duo was dying too.  
  
Long, bony, grimy fingers kneaded in the top of the little urchin's hair as dim, shadowed green eyes seemed to drift away from the pain of reality for just an instant. The older urchin had his chin and lips half-pressed to Duo's forehead, unnaturally hot and tensed from extreme hunger pangs, and sighed quietly. It was the kind filled with morbid secrecy, knowing very well that the sobbing orphan was too young to fully grasp the ravaging effects of severe starvation. Solo's eyebrows hitched painfully in the black and he pulled the unwavering warmth closer to him.  
  
It's okay, Duo. We'll make it. Soothing fingers massaged the nape of his neck, tangled in the long, tangled tresses of brown hair.   
  
The little urchin racked with a sniffle, and burrowed his nose into the warm crook of Solo's neck.   
  
You sure Solo? It hurts bad  
  
he lied with a distant, compassionate smile as flickering green eyes turned to starless metal skies, I'm sure. You're a tough boy, aren't you Duo?  
  
He only whimpered.  
  
You are a tough boy, Duo. I know you are. You're the best.   
  
Solo's eyes drifted shut, heart aching pitifully in his ribs as he gently kissed the little urchin's grungy forehead in reassurance, a false empty reassurance, but soothing and warm anyway. With that, the violent spasms of Duo's stomach seemed to settle into minor quakes and the violent sobs waned off. Mildly, Solo felt peace returning to the warm bony thing he held in his arms.  
  
Solo managed a flimsy smile in the blue-laced blackness. Just remember, Duo, boys don't cry.  
  
Duo sniffled miserably and burrowed tightly against him.   
  
See? Everything will be better in the morning.   
  
The older urchin smiled morbidly and uneasily drifted off to sleep with Duo, his adorable bag of skin and bones and hair, clinging to him dearly for hours to come.  
  
**How do I lie like that?**  
  
**Duo I wishI could**  
  
  
[---]  
  
  
[4:50 PM]  
  
  
By now, Solo's rickety confidence in his ability to handle the situation had shit its pants and scampered away whimpering like a beaten dog, though his face was frozen in it's ever present catlike, nonchalant almost brotherly expression out of sheer, undiluted terror. Terror, that, with the most wickedly disgusting breath he'd ever been damned to experiencing now wafting liberally in his face, a notorious murderer was eyeing him menacingly. Circling him even, in this wretched, dank basement littered with more shadowy, dangerous-looking objects than Solo felt comfortable with. Hell, the orphan swore that there was even something living and glaring at him sullenly with shifty, beady eyes in the corner.   
  
And it wasn't a decorative teddy bear, to say the least.  
  
So, what brings you here? A grimy tan finger trailed mischievously up the curve of Solo's cheekbone and impertinently flicked a lock of his pale gray-brown hair. Tomas Rachael only grinned at his trapped prey's nervousness, like a wolf licking its chops while a dumb fawn staggered in its direction willingly, unblinkingly, like Solo had. Absently rubbing at the spot where his grubby fingernails had trailed up his face, the younger and much less notorious of the two street rats gave no look to the teenager standing beside him, only mulled in his misty brain clouded with paranoia and angst.   
  
The nauseating smell of death was enough alone to send him scampering for the door, which had shut with the most ominous noise he could have ever imagined a slab of lifeless wood could emit. He wanted to run, run for his life it was so simple he wouldn't get killed that way, so why was he standing here cemented down? He was in the liar of a killer! Willingly! He had even knocked, for God's sake!  
  
I'm a fucking idiot.  
  
But  
  
[[]]  
  
I **need** to be a fucking idiot. For him.  
  
Hm, Solo? The dirty-dishwater blonde asked, now shifting to face him dead-on. Unflinching and predatory beneath his charming looks. He was the epitome of a cute, popular and absolutely disturbed Homecoming King who flossed his flawless, girl-slaying smile with knives.   
  
You know, the murder said cheerfully, I've seen you around a lot. Then again, you aren't quite the recluse I am, now, aren't you?   
  
Even his voice was velvety and warm, friendly and innocuous. It was sickening. He was being sociable. The pit of Solo's stomach twisted and was simultaneously crushed in panic by what seemed like a thousand lead anvils. Blood splattered anvils where his bones had been crushed by his stupidity not to move out of their falling path. In the reeking blackness, Tomas seemed to snort considerately, and a sudden scraping noise came from the dark sharply to Solo's right.   
  
The oprhan's heart was clawing at the bottom of his Adam's apple when he sensed the movement paired with the keening squeal and he whipped his head around, frightened to death and unable to rein it in. The moldy yellow glare of the light bulb panicked him, terrified him; it blurred his vision so he wouldn't be able to see the knife arching toward that delicious spot between his ribs, the lethal, silent barrel of a gun bucking with a loud crack, the  
  
chair that was pulled toward him?!  
  
Solo's white-rimmed eyes looked instantly to Tomas Rachel's face, the face of an insane, cold-blooded killer, the genuinely innocent and slightly startled face of a teenager. The blonde blinked for a moment, possibly confused at why his visitor was shaking like a veritable leaf while he'd only turned his back on him for a moment, then seemed to grasp the situation easily, like snatching a lazy dog's tail. Solo couldn't help but find the grin dangerous but still rather inviting.  
  
It was like being drawn into a pretty trap.  
  
Tomas' eyes furtively glanced down at the oprhan's knees and went back to his face. It was smudged with dirt, like any respectable urchin.   
  
Looks like you'll be needing this chair, then. You're not gonna collapse on my floor, he said, shoving the perfectly harmless wooden chair toward him so it nicked Solo's knee, after I've just cleaned it.   
  
The blonde-haired killer gave an ironic chuckle and a blazing grin as he drew up a chair of his own and had to drag it through assorted weapons and potentially dangerous and a suspiciously large amount of plastic forks and spoons.   
  
Solo stared at the killer, and the chair he'd offered, like they were singing the little teapot song in Vietnamese.  
  
Well, what are you waiting for? You came to talk business, right?  
  
  
  
Then sit! Tomas said, his voice in that ambiguous and threatening plane between humor and a hidden, impatient dark tone. The dim light flickered across the blonde's face sinisterly, although Solo could have debated if there wasn't anything wrong with him beside his breath and a few typical bolts knocked loose by a rough childhood.  
  
  
[---]  
  
[4:54]  
  
a friend?  
  
Yeah, I just need to sell it. He's starving, I'm staring and we have no way of getting money to be fed because—  
  
—No one will hire street rats like you.  
  
Solo's morbid tone spoke volumes in the dark, page of page of guilt and love and desperation left in the open air, which the killer read easily. There was also a slight of surprise in his expression, as if he had seen the blonde teenager pull the train of thought out from his skull between his eyes so easily that it was frightening.   
  
Tomas stared down at his immaculately scrubbed feet, proudly barefoot; he was unafraid of stepping on any of the assorted blades he had lying around his basement adobe.  
  
So how much can I get?  
  
For the gold necklace and the gun? Tomas's misty, distant blue eyes seemed not to acknowledge anything but the dirt in his toenails. He seemed completely comfortable to slouch forward on the side of the chair and just stare off.  
  
  
  
The killer oddly twisted his lip, biting it momentarily. He hummed tiredly, like the weight of thinking of a price wasn't the only thing haunting his brain. No, something much direr lurked in his expression.  
  
Well, for the necklace I can get you a moderately good penny, but the gun  
  
Is too lousy for scrap?  
  
Tomas finally looked up at him. Again, the surprised look, but only this time on the face of the killer; the blonde, cornflower-blue-eyed popular quarterback killer that suddenly looked a lot older than Solo expected. A tired reservation. A quiet, hidden scowl that only showed in his eyes and the stress lines hanging beneath them. Yeah, it's much too old for the market nowadays, first of all The killer's voice even lagged depressingly. And the parts look pretty much busted not much worth out of this one   
  
So, how much food do you think I could get out of the necklace? A week? Two if we go a little hungry?  
  
The rusty gun clattered to the floor as his fingers slackened and it piqued Solo's curiosity immensely, although the throbbing black paranoia still existed in the back of his mind, always waiting for the blonde to finally give up the charade and gut him with manic eyes flaring. But he didn't. The famed killer only stared down at the floor with weighted eyes and a tiny, exhausted sigh.  
  
do you know why I kill people?  
  
The orphan froze.  
  
This is not happening this is not happening it is I'm as good as dead, aren't I? Oh god why did he have to turn now? I was just starting to like him this is not happening  
  
[[ your face it's all red.]]  
  
I kill because I've been hired to. To wipe out as much of that new deadly virus possible, and keep it from spreading like wildfire across the colonies. After something of that deadly force gets out to the public in large amounts, it's practically over for life on L-2. I'm one of the few who have actually been vaccinated against it. I've been trained to recognize it hunt it out. The loss of blood pressure, anemia, eventual fevers, and weakened, rotting internal organs The people I've killed have all been infected, but I've never told anyone but you, thus far.  
  
Solo shook his head slightly, and furrowed his eyebrows. why are you telling me this, Tomas?  
  
Instantly, the blonde flinched, his own eyebrows arching upward and digging forcefully together in angst at the mention of his name. Like it'd stabbed something lodged hidden and confined in his chest. The charismatic face was replaced with an old man in a young body, a young body with unabashed knife scars marring his hands. Tomas only stared at the lanky orphan sitting across from him, almost strategically placed so the moldy yellow bulb cast a sickly looking color across Solo's face. He felt a constricting claw around the bottom of his throat.  
  
Solo asked innocently.   
  
Silently, the killer turned pawner stood from his chair and avoided stepping on an upturned hunting knife to grab the oprhan's grimy wrist, flipping it forcefully, and put a wad of crinkled green currency in his palm. He lingered there, slowly lifting his gaze to match Solo's infinitely confused one.  
  
I'm sorry, he whispered, with all earnestly behind his half-plead.  
  
And suddenly it all clicked in Solo's head.  
  
  
[---]  
  
[7:01 PM]  
  
Even as Solo delighted silently in watching the smudged little orphan that had become his last hopeful ray of sunshine in his life, there was still something lingering in the back of his mind. Of course it would be there, some bitter subconscious voice chose to announce in the dark corner he'd forgotten, shoved away and locked, despite the fierce clanging of the bells that made every normal thought a forced smiling lie. Even nursery rhymes had their own razor's edge now, cutting in to his brain and his sanity with rhythmical little slashes and rhythmical malice. || Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock. || Solo shook his head and began to take another numb bite from his dinner. It tasted like gold, nonetheless, going into such an empty stomach, but when you know when you're going to die, things like that seem to dull from glass to sand in your mind.  
  
||Hickory dickory dock||  
  
A little girl's voice chanted in the back of his brain, invented by his cruel sense of imagination. She hopscotched her way into his terror while singing an innocent nursery rhyme.  
  
The little girl turned toward him as her jumprope swung in slow motion around her body in a blurring oblong arch and smiled at him sweetly. With big blue-violet eyes.  
  
Thank you so much for the food, Solo! It's r'weally good! Where'ja get it, huh? This is awful nice food, Solo, did you have to work for it or somethin? The bouncing voice seemed to deflect straight off the older orphan's ears like sweet little nothings.  
  
Solo was intently watching Duo, with chunks of food still ringed around his mouth like snippets of confetti, and seeming to drown in the way his wide, marble-shaped purple-tinted eyes were so infinitely lively. They seemed so immortal. Alive. While the rest of the orphan he'd pulled from the fiery remains of a torched home was so emaciated and fragile-looking, there was a bubbly resilience and indeterable joy of living that sent a stab through his heart. He was going to infect him, wasn't he? Duo was so close to him all the time, there was no way he wouldn't catch it. That was why Marie had left had been pried away from him like the fearless, virtuous thing of strength she was. But Duo he was so frail and hungry it would rip through him. He was six! No matter how determined his eyes gleamed, Duo wouldn't be able to stand up to a disease like the bloody killer called the 89RT-B virus that Tomas Rachel had described.   
  
You're welcome, buddy, Solo said mechanically, smiling.  
  
It's gr'weat! Tastes so good, and I don't have to be hungry, no more, right?  
  
Solo grinned. Of course. You're the best.  
  
The orphan cutely shot him a raspberry. No, you are! He leaned back against his shoulder and took another happy, gluttonous mouthful from the flopping sub sandwich.  
  
He casually ruffled his hair, and the cheeky grin that returned was priceless. A piece of tomato rested neatly on his nose, like a poor-man's Rudolph.   
  
Suddenly, Solo felt himself move and on some desperate, buried whim, he found himself pressing the thin boy against him and his nose again pressed into the crown of his head.   
  
**I'm not going to see him. I'm not going to see him ever again**  
  
? Solo  
  
|| Hickory dickory dock||  
  
**Stupid stupid! Stupidstupidstupid! You're going to infect him, kill him!**  
  
|| The mouse ran up the clock ||  
  
what's wrong?   
  
Little, pudgy fingers unhesitatingly rested on the older orphan's elbows in a reassuring gesture that seemed to collapse every last coherent thought in Solo's mind until it was a deep, dark stew of sobbing pity. He wanted so badly to live to stay with wonderful, bright-eyed Duo until he could have better life beyond this, so he wouldn't have to watch him scrape listlessly through old garbage cans with an arm slung tenderly around his constricting stomach. To watch a little brunette boy with such a determined, promising look on life relive his own miserable and heartbreaking childhood again right before his eyes, crying in the middle of the night, stumbling during the day. The pudgy little hands didn't flinch. Ever.   
  
Does your stomach hurt? Duo asked quietly, as the older orphan's own sandwich, the only decent bite of food he'd had in the last few gritty days, slipped from his fingers to thud to the dirt where the reclusive junkyard dog had been hungrily waiting for a scrap to tumble his way from atop the junk heap.   
  
Do you want my dinner, Solo?  
  
No, it's okay you eat up  
  
Solo? What's wrong? Duo insisted worriedly, clawing at the rust-red sweater that he wore pooling around his elbows.  
  
|| Hickory dickory dum||  
  
Solo seemed to be caught in the black, pitiful trap that was the connection between his mouth and his brain, sitting there, his adorable bag of bones warm against his chest. Sand and sludge caught in his throat. His nose pressed deeper into his tangled, messy hair, so much like his when he was so young.   
  
||The clock struck one||  
  
And before he knew it, the words had already leapt from his mouth. I love you Duo.  
  
The little orphan paused, momentarily struck with mild surprise, then smiled, squeezing his big, round, blue-violet eyes shut, and leaned tighter into his brother figure's grip. I love you too, Solo!  
  
Solo smiled back.   
  
Thank you Duo.  
  
You're welcome! he chirped happily.   
  
Solo gripped the loving bag of skin and bones closer and suddenly felt nothing of the chilling colony air, heard nothing of the dogs barking and general bustling hum of people and cars. He sensed nothing of the impending blackness that would be death that hung like cold blanket slowly being lowered over his shoulders anymore, just a deep-rooted pang in his heart for his little violet-eyed orphan.  
  
You're okay, right, Solo?  
  
He chuckled, all traces of his depression hidden successfully behind a grin, and rubbed at his eye. 'Course I am. Boys don't cry.  
  
  
[---]  
  
  
Later that night, however, that would not be true. Solo awoke suddenly and sat up upon his bed. He knew it was time. He looked upon the darkness one more time before he was to take those fateful steps from the junkyard with a tiny worried shadow walking behind.  
  
|| Hickory dickory dock. The mouse ran back down the clock. ||  



	6. The Things We Do

Chapter 6  
  
  
  
"The Things We Do"  
  
  
  
I know that no matter what the outcome is of this war that I'm living in now, this hell of a mess of conflicting politics and vulgar egos and old crybabies with six ton fancy mechanical toys to smash whomever and whatever and whenever they please, Heero won't ever be considered good enough by society. There will be no angelic choirs to proclaim his good deeds, no one in white robes to greet him with smiles and exalting words, even if he were to walk out onto a battlefield and simply tell them to stop and instantaneously fill the world with an everlasting peace. Nuh-uh. Not a lucky break like that. Until the end of his days, until the last stubborn drop of blood and sweat drains from his body, until every last iota of sanity is wholly singed from the insanity of a war like this one, he will always have two major forces frowning upon him. The first, of course, is those who will hate him no matter what. There will always be those people, blaming him for deaths of friends and loved ones, sneering on whatever decent name he can scrounge up for himself instead of just some dirty teenage terrorist, and I guess I can't do much about it. But the second is a thousand times worse.   
  
There is hardly an ounce in those haunting, almost deadly blue eyes that honestly cares what ignorant, oblivious snarl-toothed people say about him, but there is a bitter critic inside his stoic, unaffected outward show that he knows isn't ignorant. Heero is more than intelligent enough to know a difference between killing in defense, and slaughtering innocents in the process. And he's also dumb enough to keep on killing his own self, his own mind, over it. …I know it's wrong to kill… I know how wrong it is to take life from another person. … I can feel the painful throb of guilt deeply ingrained in my chest, so deep it'll probably never leave me, but I also understand how to live with it and try to live a better life for it. I can feel the way the bleeding-heart guilt radiates and oozes out of Heero's skin when he thinks I'm asleep across the room beneath my disheveled bed covers. Hell, who couldn't, really? I mean, if you only know him, then you can feel the rifts in his practically flawless stoicism like red-hot shockwaves of an earthquake. I don't think I've ever been as hurt as that night when he sat down on the edge of his bed as noiselessly as Death itself, and let out a single choked sob that could have mistaken as an irrelevant sigh to anybody else. Well, maybe I have hurt like that before,  
  
[[…Come on, Du-chan…]]  
  
but this was a whole new stainless steel butcher knife through my heart.   
  
I can just see it, like a horrific record scratching back and forth on the fuzzy television screen of my imagination, a nightmare on loop: My arm reaches out to comfort him, to just …just let him know I don't want him to be in pain anymore… And then, my palm is on his shoulder, and his tensed, bronzed skin is icy cold from sitting up working all night. His face whirls around with the expression of a limping, bleeding frightened deer, with the most stunning blue eyes ever to haunt a single soul, and then the soldier clicks back into place and there's now a bloody stump sadly replacing my left arm.   
  
  
= this is the end  
beautiful friend =  
  
  
Pain and apology would flash like holy diamond light in his eyes, but I would be beaten to a pulp nonetheless. Emotionally, verbally, physically—take your sorry pick from his delightful grab bag of assorted violence. Because he can't afford to let any one in. Never. This is a war. The grinding wheels of the unforgiving, foaming-red war machine will chew up anyone senseless enough to look back for even a split second. Heero knows this. I can see in his pretty blue eyes, the horror of knowing that fact like a thousand-year-old priest lives and breathes the Bible.   
  
He would refuse to look back for anyone if it meant restoring some fucking futile peace to this senseless fucking planet that probably deserves a good apocalyptic slap in the face!  
  
  
= this is the end  
my only friend, the end =  
  
  
And especially not for such a dirty worthless thief with mortally bad luck like me.  
  
  
= lost in a roman  
wilderness of pain =  
  
  
On the outside, a bitter smile surfaces on my mouth and I roll over with a dull, acidic throb from the bullet holes pocked up and down my calves. Bullets from my own gun, with a trigger snapped by my own comrade, the walking ghost of my dreams. The killer in my dreams.  
  
  
= no safety or surprise   
the end =  
  
  
Staring like some passive corpse into the depths my pitch-black room, I feel the claws of depression and those sad-eyed nightmares creep around my legs from underneath my bed. Fucking pathetic revistiation of my childhood, having to cringe beneath the covers, the bloodstained covers, and hide from a pair of glowing eyes in my bone-filled closet. A pair of fiercesome, absolutely pained blue eyes.  
  
  
= I'll never look   
into your eyes again =  
  
  
That's when the bolts unlock with a deadly metallic ping and Heero finally comes in.  
  
  
= and all the children  
are insane =  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Ghosts and killers are, by design, very quiet in nature. Feet don't exist for them; they glide through layers and layers of darkness without a sound because that is what they are meant to do. Slip in between the insignificant cracks and disappear on any malicious whim. Efficient. There is nothing unconfident about the way a true killer goes about his blasphemous deeds with any of his various weapons; to hesitate would be a blasphemy upon itself. And naturally, because the profession of a soldier takes a page from the aforementioned killer, that is how my comrade just has to enter the room and scare the living hell out of me. I lift silently from bed I'm lying on as I hear the last of the muted rusty squeals of the door shutting that have become the last signs of the imminent apocalypse for me and sit up to face my end quietly. Like a man.  
  
Yeah. Right.   
  
I don't want to die.  
  
The darkness drapes around the room in layers, like dark sashes of fabric flowing constantly about the air, saturating it like a thick invisible poison. Normally, my eyes could have picked him out from the indiscriminate darkness within a few seconds. But, you have to keep in mind, normally I'm not stressed out of my mind with five bloody bullet holes in my legs and a beautiful killer seemingly ready to rip me from limb to limb at the slightest show of emotion. If you can call screaming my lungs out at him and declaring him a 'fucking liar' a slight show of emotion. My heart is doing a thousand miles an hour, like a crazed ecstasy junkie spasming beneath my ribs with the intent to claw its way out and flop about the floor in a bloody, tangled mess of apology and anger and almost painful infatuation. A direct reflection of the glory that is Duo Maxwell right about now I think as my eyes sharply focus on the nothingness. There is one last rusty complaint of the door before I fall back into that dangerous silence Heero is so famous for. [the killing one]   
  
Again, the memories and various muted sensations of my infatuation with the Japanese pilot seem to take hold of my brain and mold it into a bowl of watery, optimistic jelly. Something about the way his blue eyes had flashed with anger before still only makes the little snare drum pound harder in my ribs while he is undoubtedly getting closer; like some stupid teenager waiting for the sweet blade of a killer to quench his or her strange sexual frustration with a friendly slash and a kinky death. But then again, I'm reminded. I call myself Death; I can't ever call myself completely homegrown sane anymore.   
  
Of course Death is in love with the Killer! What ironic angst… so depressing… unaffirming… It'll be a big fucking blockbuster.  
  
Of course I recognize the small, discriminatory metallic clink slowly approaching me that I've heard a billions times before. Of course I know it's my gun; he shot me with it, didn't he? Suddenly, my eyes seem to adjust to the blackness laced only by the distant, dull glow of the slight crescent moon that sifts in through the small basement window as if hovering at the end of a mile long tunnel. And I see my killer moving like a surreal phantom through those layers of darkness with the Colt clenched in his right hand like a lethal version of the Ten Commandments being brought down from Mount Sinai. Moving with a purpose, soldier firmly in control. Something cold drops into the pit of my belly at that instant.  
  
It must be my infaution. Is replaced by fear.  
  
Heero's angular yet still round and young face is gorgeous and feral in the near lack of lighting. Why wouldn't it be? It always is. I can't physically make out his eyes with my own gaze, but there is no doubt in my mind that he's staring forcefully at me, like some mecha to be reduced to individual protons or stubborn computer system begging to be thrown into submission, or the colorful wires ripped out and disposed of in favor of a few newer, more updated, more secure ones. Why wouldn't he be? He always is. The slim brunette, not much more than a defined shadow dusted with dim dark-gray light, pauses in his ghostly quiet walk toward my sleeping place and turns silently toward the bedside table beside it. As if it has more to contribute to the conversation or something. My Colt glints for a second as he lays it down.  
  
** Ch-chink. **  
  
When he speaks, I'm shocked at how wonderful and unique his voice is and how I was unaware of missing it so much until that moment.  
  
"You still have one left."  
  
I don't even have to say "What?" before his eyes turn to me at their exotic and dangerous angle and he continues in a gravelly-sure tone.   
  
"There's still one bullet left. I have an extra magazine for you if you would like it." The dark blue eyes that have obsessed me enough to somewhat overlook the downsides of falling in love with a violence-prone soldier turn away again and I look down to the beside table where my gun lies gleaming. I hear some more clinks and muted rattles as he produces the promised magazine from the pocket of his jeans. Wait—He's wearing his jeans?   
  
{I suppose. His other clothes probably aren't washed yet. They've still got bits of you on them, Duo.}  
  
He doesn't bother looking up to my face when he asks me again, that asshole. That beautiful, intelligent, violent asshole. His eyes maintain their statue-like rapport with the grainy brick walls while long fingers twitch half-impatiently around the smooth metal gun insert. It amazes me as I sit there like some hospital-ridden maiden, silent and reserved in my fear of my abusive husband, fussing over my black eye, and refusing to speak with him. Grace him, even, with words he'll probably only find insignificant and insufficient to his standards anyway.  
  
"Do you want it?" The textbook tone of his voice seems to remember nothing that happened only a night or two before, discard it as easily as a bad poker card. I don't remember exactly either, but I had been pocked full of holes and unconscious at the moment. It infuriates me, and the thundering snare drum heart barrels on into an intense militant drum roll to accommodate the mood. Anger and frustration spiced on top.  
  
But I won't make the same mistake twice.  
  
"Do you want it?" Heero repeats.  
  
I stare up into his general direction for a moment, more fascinated with the darkness of my own room than the flat, robotic expressional expert offering me more bullets. No thanks, the ones from my legs will suffice, thank you, I think smarmily and expect poor Heero to hear inside my head and know to back off. Despite the fact that pain still shoots up from my wounds whenever I move significantly, I still lift the red-stained quilt up and roll over onto my side so I can face the dirt wall there.  
  
And when I'm not faced with the image of Heero Yuy's face, my nerves seem to scurry back tentatively and bark at him from underneath their protective blankie like a nervy child mocking his closet monsters. "Take the bowl up to Quatre, please. Tell him I enjoyed it and I appreciate the thought," I reply in an equally emotionally devoid tone. "Thank you."  
  
There is another silent bomb between us that lasts and lasts and lasts for an eternal 2.5 seconds, like a firecracker exploding and making no sound, but leaving unmistakable heat laden in the air and choking each other with tension. Heero seems not to be overly affected by this statement in either direction, positively or negatively, but continues on anyway. Stubborn blue-eyed machine.   
  
"I'm not supposed to be down here. I don't think Quatre would be pleased with discovering I've been down here…" A pause in his voice. And just when I think he can get even less human, there's a glitch in the system and two little words pop out of his mouth that I know a machine could never say with such quiet, almost shy hesitation. "…With you."  
  
But no… he wouldn't mean that. Don't let him get to you with his contrived act he's leeched off from watching you in the reflection of his laptop, Duo, you know it's for his own good anyway. He won't die this way.  
  
So… I continue on, my joker's mask traded for something a little more abrasive. A Heero idiom.  
  
"Quatre isn't pleased in the first place with you, I would suspect," I say matter-of-factly while trying to hold back a snarl waiting, clawing, pining in the pit of my throat. "And you've never been one to exactly change yourself for the feelings of others, so by all means, don't start now… I'm finished with the soup; you can take it now, thank you."  
  
Heero hesitates again, as if presented with a chess piece that had snappily come to life and chewed him out for a poor play, complete with wooden and painted face contorting angrily. Or perhaps there really is no emotion left in him and it's just the computer computing frantically for a humane response. If it's the latter, it comes up with a poor attempt to make better with me.  
  
"You could do it yourself, you know."  
  
And instantly, my eyebrows furrow like a dog and I'm slowly returning to the room with the slamming doors and dead orphan ashes, the blue light and the frenzy that eventually wanes off into black in my memory. I find no reason that Heero shouldn't be apologizing with every atom of his being right now and definitely no reason to preach at me like some fucking detached schoolteacher while I lie in bed with five large crimson-doused bullet holes currently decorating my body.  
  
"No thank you," I manage to grit back in reasonable time so my anger doesn't lash out once again. God, my teeth ache from how hard I'm biting down, probably imagining a familiar Asian face ground into a hamburger patty and ready to be torn apart and devoured angrily. "You can take it…_ Heero_. It's the least you can do for me now, while I'm still recovering."   
  
My voice is grated like gravelly human pulp through a cheese grater at that last part. If tone could kill, there would be thousands of salad forks plunged firmly between the beautiful Japanese pilot's eyes. It becomes quiet, save for the distant, ignored *tink* of the magazine being set down. I sit and grit my teeth broodingly while lying on my side for a few more moments, and slowly realize that Heero's computer has either idled desperately, or…  
  
He's facing me.  
  
My eyes fly completely open and the little snare drummer boy in my chest accidentally impales himself with his drumstick and my heart subsequently skips a beat. Or maybe a few. But anyway, all I know at that moment is that Heero has somehow moved without making so much as a shoe-scuff against the grungy floor and circled around my bed to crouch beside my head, dark blue eyes gleaming at me ambiguously and deliciously beneath slightly furrowed brows. My shocked senses intercept the image of a pale blur moving directly toward me—his hand—and all alarms begin to blare in my body, terror cemented in place by lacing hot memories of being shot like a slab of meat is tenderized. I jerk backwards violently so that the empty bowl rattles behind me on the table.  
  
"Hey!"  
  
And as the fingers wrap tightly around the edge of the quilt, at first, I'm completely confused, but as soon as they begin to pull back, the understanding clicks dreadfully in my brain. All hell breaks loose in my mind and it squeals like a schoolgirl flaunting a hipbone-length skirt being pinched. However, the ice to the fiery chaos in my mind is the haunting way those Prussian eyes never waver in their gravestone intensity. And it scares me.  
  
"Hey—HEY!"   
  
I screech in an anger-gilded terror as Heero peels the quilt back.   
  
The intricate splatter masterpieces of dried blood seeping through the fabric twist and distort as it yields just as easily as if it were five-inch thick steel to the incomparable Heero Yuy.   
  
No!  
  
Little fissures of pain and heat lace upward from each puncture and flesh wound on my legs just as quickly as the pinwheel of fear begins to spin furiously in my brain and distort my vision to a new version of the rage I'd displayed before. A more dangerous one. Because this time, I'm scared, and I'm armed, and Heero isn't. And that's the fucking truth as the dim, dark world turns another corrupted shade darker into an insane blood red and my arm whips backwards, fingers outstretched and gripping around cold Colt metal. As soon as I turn again, my hands snapping that safety back harder than God could smite the Morning Star given half the chance, there is cold air sweeping across my injured body.  
  
"Don't fucking touch me. You have no right," I hiss raggedly as the lightweight barrel so deadly in its mechanical simplicity—hammer, trigger, ammunition, curt little 'bang', and viola: solution found—brushes against the Japanese pilot's forehead in a tempting little cove between his eyes. Those beautiful things that have come to instill such a enraptured fear in me that it rivals my fear of hurting anyone, of hurting him, any more.   
  
Those two Prussian stone basin eyes never even consider the munition of death that has found a cozy nest just above his brains with all intent to pin those aforementioned brains to the wall behind him if commanded so by my own finger. To enact an ageless right of an eye for an eye, bullet for bullet, permanently fractured security for a last breath.   
  
][Here we are, once again…][   
  
Half-dramatically, half-sloppily, I have lifted the Colt needlessly far out in front of me, arm straightened and shoulder high against my neck, ready to fire some not so harmless clicks off in rapid succession until the chambers cough dry over and over again and until I've finally just given into my Shinigami curse and given my damned object of affection a merciful end.  
  
Would I really do it? Would I really not do it? Do I want to know? Don't I really want to know? Thunder in my brain hisses this seductive, breathy tune of, 'Of course,' while a fiercely upset black hole somewhere in my chest thrashes against it, screaming as loud as it can to drown out my brain. And finally, there is a vulgar, earthy smell of death that lingers in my mouth somewhere between the two. And none seem to be able to win me over fully. As my finger twitches—  
  
------  
---------  
-------------  
  
_"I did this?" _  
  
-------------  
---------  
-----  
  
From some far off somewhere beyond the fractured, manic-depressive bullfight cage filled with different conflicting forces that is my mind, each foaming at the mouth with anxiety, tension, suspense like demons waiting for fresh human meat to fall dead, I hear the faint sound of Heero's voice. No louder than a single raindrop against the tin roof of a long dead household. But it's like a little electric knife singing through every nerve in my brain, like a drugged bit thrust into the frothing mouth of an enraged, ensnared stallion, like a faint wake up call five floors below causing the long-slumbering voice of reason to jolt violently awake in the attic of my head. There is one last spark of fury that whirls in my head before it abruptly dies and winks out noiselessly. Like a TV contentedly signing off.  
  
][…that's all and good night, ladies and gentlemen…][  
  
That's when I blink twice and realize what Heero is doing.  
  
And I have to blink at least twice, trust me.  
  
All reservations of my half-dressed state aside, Heero has pulled back the quilt to unveil the bullet wounds of his doing and now seems entranced by them, like watching green blips of information flash across a screen continually in a small dark room. The shadows laid thick across the current small dark room only serve to enhance the already pained face that surfaces where the infatuating and infuriating human stone wall had stood before and where it had crumbled away like unusable fairy dust. Heero painfully, as if a razor were cutting paper-thin slits down the soles of his feet, seems to settle back an inch and stare down at my legs with muddled comprehension. A babyish look that doesn't believe, doesn't wanna. Doesn't want to accept my war-pocked souvenirs of my 'best' friend. But they're there, disinfected and forever betraying like the image a smoking gunshell in my mind.  
  
There is still some faint, watery red coloring around the actual wounds themselves and a few half-forgotten streaks of pale crimson where the blood had dried before being ritually cleaned off. Mostly, my legs returned to their perpetual bony and sun-starved state. The entire length of my legs ache like thousand year old arthritis and kneecaps of ragged sawdust. The little lines of tension that freeze violently up whenever those blue eyes find something new to stir me up with burn like matches smoldering beneath my skin.   
  
The first bullet, I've concluded was a direct hit, since it managed to lodge itself a fraction above my left thighbone and a precarious inch from my easily-shattered left kneecap. That is, if you must be prompted, is where I temporarily became a human drumstick, complete with tweezers stabbed into my leg after the bullet. Most of the damage is centered on my left side: probably the haphazard side I'd landed on after being dropped. There are two slivered graze wounds along my right calf that are still caked a tender, bloody red and are roughly half the diameter of a no. 2 pencil. Another bullet ripped through the flesh just above my right ankle, but luckily escaping damage to my hamstring.   
  
1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.   
  
Bingo, bingo, bingo, I think sourly in a misty corner of my mind. Every last lashing comment, every last bitter demon that dictates my mouth from the safe corners of my resentment, everything wrong I try to find with him comes rushing back like a manipulative schoolmarm, trying to turn me. Turn me against Heero. It almost succeeds; the red, sinister film flickering on the corner of my vision begins to creep back in. (( But you can't, can you? )) because at that moment, the molasses-thick death tension in the air drops dead and the universe decides it's time to stop this raging. Heero puts his hand on my right leg, an iron of foreign heat, and it sits there so profoundly that even my street-bred American temper stills for a moment.  
  
"I did this?" he says again, more to himself than anything.   
  
His soft voice is getting hard to hear above my stunned silence.  
  
Riddle me this and riddle me that. Take away the soldier and what do you get? …I honestly don't know any more.  
  
And when I see his eyebrows hitch together in the slightest, most revolutionizing look of anguish and arch upward, then I can't honestly even remember my name. I'm breathing, but there is no air reaching the knot in my chest.   
  
Holy Mary full of grace… It hurts to see him like that. I can't stand any more of those tragic, disappointed looks; not in Solo's green eyes, jaded and washed in half-hearted streetlamp lights, not Heero's dark blue eyes doused with a raw, innocent hurt that cuts to the quick lightning fast. It makes me feel like a muddled pane of glass, lodged in a rotted, distant wall, unable to even make him acknowledge I'm here… that I can never help, and that I will never be able to help. A muddled window blocking out the few sunrays that come his way.  
  
I feel so fucking guilty. And his hand is so warm and… unjudgemental? …on my leg just above my knee, thumb touching the edge of my wound ever so slightly.  
  
And the gun barrel still as lethal as ever feels so cold, brittle, empty and potent all at the same time against Heero's skull. All but ready to obligate him with an instantaneous death. One more lonely ** ch-chink **, I realize, with eyes widening slowly on the outside, that another Solo would have passed through this world. My hand jerks it away quicker than if it were poison and the gun rests in my lap, two hands still grasped in uncertainty around it. A flurry of little metallic clinks falling upon my ears only confirms that I have been successfully reduced to a bag of nerves and started shaking like a fool.  
  
Still, his eyes never waver, running in a constant loop across every pocked and faintly stained plane of my legs in a saturated run of guilt until he finally seems to fill his cavernous guilt cup. Heero flickers a low and lifeless glance in my direction but tears it away before I barely have time to realize he's even moved. His hand is gone. The slim brunette settles noiselessly onto his haunches and half way back into the indiscriminate darkness before finally speaking again. And the very essence of his voice is pain, so I have to flinch despite my unrelenting frustration and fear/anger with him.  
  
"I didn't realize you were hurt that badly," he says softly. "I didn't know…"  
  
An eyebrow sinks on my face just slightly when I hear the programmed mechanical tone again glazing it over. Damn it, I thought I was so close…I run the pad of my finger along the dark metal of my gun, quaking like an aspen leaf in a winter gale. It's my last rope that binds me to sanity in this quiet storm of my brain but also slowly draws me closer to madness as well. My Colt. Like a hangman's noose rope momentarily suspending me from the snapping war dogs below, but slowly choking the life from me. And Heero would stand beside my swinging corpse with those sad eyes. I can't believe it…  
  
"_Heero_…"   
  
In the darkness, in the misty corner of my peripheral vision, I see Heero slightly flinch at the mewling sound of my sleep-ragged voice and his head shift upward in the vague direction of my face, shyly, stoically. Cloaked in shadow. To be honest, I was almost as surprised to realize I'd spoken out loud. Afraid. So I stumble across the fault of my own unruly tongue and lower my head to hopefully erase the fact that I'd said anything at all. But the damage has been done, of course; I've said it nonetheless.   
  
I don't have to look to see, to feel, the crushing cold weight of disappointment that radiates off Heero when I fall silent and seemingly ignore him clawing at my face in guilt. God …how his own self-destructive guilt clings to air so intensely and drips right off onto my skin, I'll never understand. It itches and slithers down my spine, like the malicious breath of the reaper laughing on the back of my neck, the reaper with malcontent and wickedness in his sense of humor, the reaper who takes the people in my life away just for shits and giggles. He's always there, I know he has to be.  
  
Otherwise, none of it would have happened. If not for me, Solo would have stayed alive. Not sacrificing his life for a snot-nosed brat orphan. Not rotting. If not for me, Heero wouldn't have those damned sad, guilty eyes.  
  
While the quiet chokes in around me, I feel my hands begin to quiver and ache from holding the cold, metallic gun so intensely and I blink lifelessly down at it.   
  
If not for me, Heero wouldn't be in danger of being shot. Wouldn't be in danger of becoming a rag doll sprawled across the floor, a cherry-colored hole neatly between his eyes. Rotting.  
  
So I slowly move my fingers, trailing tensely along the boxy curves of the weapon, and decisively remove the all-but-empty magazine, letting it fall into my palm. I feel Heero's eyes burning along my face and down toward the now unloaded weapon.   
  
If not for me…  
  
And I drop it, so it folds into the depths of the red-decorated quilt.  
  
And Heero's dark blue eyes return to their smoldering on the side of my face.  
  
"Why did you shoot me?" I ask in a sudden, quiet, and emotionally stripped tone that I hadn't even felt within in me. Spills out from my mouth, the subconscious searing question that just now has gnawed its way out into the light, into the stupid fucking light. There is a stab of lukewarm nervousness in my stomach, as it punctures through and seeming slashes through the last confused butterfly left in my belly. My eyes shift upward of their own accord, digging through the layers of black to find Heero's face.  
  
Two Prussian eyes uncertainly lock on my face; his lips remain stone tight, pressed together, half like a startled child being drilled for a frightening schoolroom answer, and half like an emotionally void stone. I can't decide what half frustrates me more without an answer.  
  
"Why did you shoot me?"  
  
Hurt slivers through the color of his eyes in little black sparks and he flinches that way without making a movement. I can practically see the melody line for "Taps" dancing behind them. [1] But no answer.  
  
I feel the last of my taut, threadbare lines of patience connecting my brain together begin to wear thin and pull uncomfortably tight. There is such a pale, blank and cluttered expression on Heero's face that it begins to turn me into a blood-hungry law CEO, snarling at the back of my employees for a slow job. But… but, it's not the same, another corner of my mind interjects in fear. He shot me… it's a little bit different than a late Highland complaint. [2]   
  
The edges of red are returning.  
  
I'll say it again. "Why did you shoot me, Heero?" I say, feeling enough nerve to drown myself in the beauty of his face while saying those words with such a bold aggravation.  
  
"Who's Solo?" the Japanese boy asks in response, with traces of nothing in his flat, textbook voice. The hurt lingering like a fog in his pretty blue eyes does nothing to convince me that he is not again reverted to distrusting bastard state, the one who landed the punch that led to the shot heard around the world. Or at least my world.   
  
The Colt twitches lethally in my grip as I flinch at the sound of Solo's name and the sheer fact that Heero can even listen find the energy to stoop down low enough to listen to me for once, even if I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. All my anger begins to refill in the wrinkles of my brain and slowly come to a blood-red boil. Why doesn't he listen to me, but yet still listen and infuriate me anyway? Why?! Why do his eyes look so damn sympathetic? He doesn't know me, he doesn't understand!  
  
"That's none of your business," I reply softly, the underlying growl of defense not at all inconspicuous. There is a pang somewhere deep down and twisted up within me, invoking the image of green eyes, and it fuels the fire. Another metallic twitch from the gun. "Why did you shoot me?" There is less courtesy that time around.  
  
The blazing blue eyes never flinch from my face as he stands like a silent, calmed wraith beside my bed, still weak and watery with sympathy and that damned hurt expression. His voice is equally frustrating. That asshole. "Who's Solo?" he repeats.  
  
"What makes you think you can ask me that!" I snap back, my fists clenching around the textured handle and butt of the gun like a male silverback gorilla snapping tree trunks in half as he only begins to rage. My stomach makes a tight constriction, forcing all the searing hot stress further out into my body, fueling the flames even higher.  
  
Heero's prussian blue eyes soften a fraction. But 99½ of an emotionless asshole is still an emotionless asshole.  
  
"If you're not going to answer my question," the soldier says quietly with this unbelievable fucking tone of calm and equally depressed and depressing resignation, "then I should probably go."   
  
And as if I may still have my doubts, the slim brunette shifts in the shadows away from me in a noiseless, ghostly manner that sends as many chills down my spine as hot sparks of anger into my head. He actually begins to walk away. Another sliver of the final patience string begins to wither and splinter off.   
  
Hail Mary, full of grace… Hail Mary, full of grace  
  
My voice raises defiantly in the thick black tension of the room soaking around me and it lashes after the turned shoulder of my infuriating beautiful killer. "Why did you shoot me? Tell me!" I snap. But, swallowed by unrelenting shadow, the chiseled form of my defector still keeps a steady pace, unhindered by my childish snapping. My fingers are ready to burst into bloody shrapnel I'm busting my hands around my Colt so viciously, and my teeth grind like machines.  
  
"Answer me!" I shout after him. "…Baka!"  
  
He pauses – miraculously – and doesn't instantaneously kill me with the sharp gleaming edge of his deathglare. Instead, he turns and flatly seems to calculate the word I've just said like a cold slate computer.   
  
Bastard, Asshole, Killer, Asshole.  
  
Despite the darkness, from his infinitely distant and all-too-close position at the foot of my bed, I see his eyebrows hitch slightly together again as he runs his eyes all along my face. Smoldering, burning, considering, leaving that heartwrenching guilt in every little niche to ferment like poison. His arms hang loose at his sides, as drained and tired as his voice when he finally finds the heart or just the begrudged patience with my flaring tempers to answer.   
  
"I had to." His prussian eyes turn liquid, exhausted but still stone-edged in the dim light. "I wanted you to stay and you wouldn't listen to me; you kept trying to leave."  
  
"That's no reason to shoot me!" I snap back in haste and with unambiguous bitterness. "Come on Heero, I'm sick of playing this game. Just fucking tell me!"  
  
Blue eyes have pierced straight through my drained supply of rage and discontented anger and it's leaking fast. There's just something so raw and innocent in those killing eyes that have seen rivers of blood and destruction with only a distant blink that are focused solely on me, waiting for my vinegar, snarling reaction, that rips every last abrasive nerve from my brain. Slowly, until my brain becomes frustrated mush and I want it to be good old days when I'd just storm off making some gnashing comments about how crazy he was. Not like now, when we've made it a ritual to shoot each other to end each conversation.  
  
Japanese eyes look carefully to me across the sea of black and tension, the same small and sympathetic look a child would receive lying in bed injured, equal and synonymous with the pitiful look of the child itself. There's a tiny, sad twitch at the corner of his mouth.   
  
It says, 'I'm sorry Duo, but I don't think you can understand now,' and then adds ever so sweetly {infuriating}, 'Try again later.'   
  
And I don't want to know that as the fringes of my world and my bullet holes are soaking in blood red.  
  
That red intensifies into this deadly but beautiful tint that swallows my vision up again, until I could swear I'm still staring into the strawberry red gash bleeding down Heero's face on that now infamous post-mission night. Until I could swear there's a flash and burn in my face as I remember knuckles slashing across my face. Until I see I see Heero's shadowy figure again surge forward through the darkness, inevitably headed for the door. That single movement single-handedly pushes me over the edge in rage while a tiny fractured part of me is curled up into a rocking ball in my mind. My eyebrows furrow again, pain lacing upward into my forehead, and I snap my head toward the moving shadow, a Shinigami snarl rumbling out from my mouth.  
  
"Heero!"   
  
Nothing.   
  
"Answer me, Heero!"  
  
He's still going for the door. Damned beautiful shadow killer.  
  
And… they're off! It's the roan 3-year old Futility on the inside; neck and neck with blood bay Wrath. But what's this? Recklessness is coming up fast on the outside!  
  
From within the crazed red haze I dig my fingers into the boiling pot of anger and pull out an equally crazed solution and fearlessly shift my fingers back into position around the my Colt. I knock off the safety fiercely, making sure to make a loud enough metallic clink to reach the Perfect Soldiers more than capable ears with a very profound sound. My eyes, low and dangerous in my skull, never waver at the Japanese pilot's back. In a very lethal tone, I lift the barrel toward my ear so the cold black metal burrows into my bushy, bed-gnarled hair and bark at him, "You want me to take that magazine offer up?"   
  
And slowly, an Asian face turns to meet my gaze in the shadows. If didn't see perfectly in darkness, I would have said there was a flicker of compassion and worry in those stony, dark blue eyes as he witnesses me put the barrel of my own gun to my own skull.   
  
Now he's listening.  
  
"No, I don't," Heero says quietly. "Put it down."  
  
I morbidly grin toward him, with more brash nerve than I really feel, and demand, "Then answer me, okay?"  
  
In the darkness, Heero nods just slight enough to be noticed, but not so the strange gleam in his intense expression of stoicism fades an ounce. Stiff lined and at least mildly displeased with this fickle situation, I can see. The morbid, faked smile aches a little wider, a little shallower as the night seconds tick by.  
  
"Tell me," I ask firmly and simultaneously lower the black weapon so it rests, like a killing ice pack, against my leg. "Why did you freak out on me in the first place?"  
  
Heero shifts fluidly to face me dead on, a strained light flittering behind his eyes. If it's a sign of my imminent death by his hand, or just another spark of guilt coming to life, I'll never know, because it's gone again when he opens his mouth. As if I'm an ignorant, conceited teenager, the Japanese pilot narrows his dark blue eyes. "Can't I want to protect you?" he asks.  
  
"I don't need you breathing down my neck!" I snap back, ready to withdraw my fangs and find a new fresh section of the Heero steak and dig my teeth into it and rip it to shreds. That bastard, he can't look at me like that, he can't treat me like I'm so much less than him when I've saved his life more than once, fought by his side as his equal, cried over his pathetic ass when he committed suicide in Siberia…   
  
He has no right.   
  
"I made a decision by myself that I wanted to risk my life to save yours and you turn on me and chew me out for it! What the hell is that for?!" The air clatters infinitely as I slam the butt of my gun against the mattress, my rage flowing through every corner of me like firewater again. My own breath begins to hiss out between my teeth; my chest winds up just as tightly as my brain.  
  
Heero shifts almost uneasily towards the bed. "Duo—"  
  
"No," I cut him off with a sharp flick of my tongue, "I want to know why Quatre and Trowa and Wufei were ten times more bruised and bloodied than I was and you turn on me and act like I just snitched us out to the enemy for freaking pocket change! Why aren't I good enough?"  
  
Across the tension-laden black, I sense a sharp pang of frustration slowly gaining momentum somewhere down in Heero's stomach; the running signs gleam darkly in his eyes. But it's the lack of anger in that frustration, a soft-toothed bite almost, that serves to infuriate *me.*. Heero furrows his eyebrows and adopts blaring slivers of guilt in his miraculously monotone voice.   
  
"You are good enough. I didn't want you to hurt yourself to try and rescue me, that's all, Duo."   
  
"Oh, and it wouldn't hurt me if you had died, Heero?" I retort, my eyes burning into his face.  
  
The brunette Japanese boy seems to glide over my remark without so much as a scraped knee and rolls on, his face growing taut in the shadowy dim light, his tongue wrapped securely around his robotic wave pattern of speech. "It would be stupid for you to sacrifice yourself needlessly, Duo. You don't need to throw your life away." Every once and a while, I witness the flaw in his slate mantras of noble heroism as his eyes flicker quietly to the gun still held in a uncertainty in my lap. It's only like dangling meat in front of a dog; it pushes me along on adrenaline and pent-up war frustrations relentlessly.  
  
I clench my fingers until the blood nearly chokes off from the sheer force I'm squeezing with. "I want to help you sometimes, okay? Is that fucking wrong?" I snap at him. At his haunting blue eyes that mock the green ones in my memory just with their ability to drive me to such extreme places in my rocky outcroppings of emotions.   
  
"If you do that, you're only going to hurt yourself because of me." Heero's eyes darken one final time before the age-old cracks in the Soldier's grip begin to surface. "I don't want that!"   
  
"And you think you won't get hurt because of me, huh?" I half-shriek back. My Colt quivers as loudly a metallic rainstorm on a windowpane in my hands. "For once in your life Heero Yuy, stop looking at everything like it's a mission printout and think! Think why I call myself fucking Shinigami! It's not too hard to figure out!"  
  
Those Prussian eyes never flinch, furrowed in guilt and a smoldering frustration, as the flaming train wreck Maxwell flies straight past the station of tactfulness and sanity. They only glow deeper with guilt.  
  
"I kill everyone I ever love! You want to die, Heero?!"  
  
And that's when he flinches. Ever so slightly, but enough to be seen. "Duo…"  
  
My teeth grind together as an uncontrollable, feral growl goes through my body and harshly out my mouth to silence him and I shake my head violently. "Do you?!"  
  
The eyes I've adored from a distance, the ones that I've feared, looked away from when I was caught staring, the eyes that should, by all logical accounts and natural calculations, turn stony and as abrasive as sharpened porcupine quivers and became inhuman as stone, suddenly are as human as anything can ever be for him. There's apology in his expression; a blatant bloody look of 'I'm sorry' far from an infuriating sense of pity. It never needs to reach his mouth. I can tell… he means it. Heero gives me a tiny fraction of an apologetic twitch of the lips and it slowly curves into a sad-looking tiny smile directed at me no less, across the layers of black.   
  
"I'm not afraid of death."  
  
That's when the shadow of the killer, of the blue-eyed killer, slowly turns like a lukewarm beacon of light in the sea of black after nodding a quiet goodbye and moves toward the door.  
  
He… He… He's so stupid! I don't want him to die! I yammer in my brain, as it instantaneously tangles into a throbbing swarm of twisted cables and overlaying emotion nerves flaring with an overload that the Maxwell ship has never before experienced and hell if it was ever prepared for. Little sprites in my brain are ripping little brown tufts of hair out, blowing gaskets as shrapnel through their ears at this situation. A cramped, adoring mess pounding just below my ribs. A mangled, baffled snarl that sears in my head. And on a spasm, on an inborn defense, on the whim of a confused nerve that has been crushed with a mallet, I find my arm whipping up again, finger rattling against the cold metal trigger. The smooth, clean barrel is leveled at Heero's head like a frightening revelation.  
  
Two prussian eyes turn toward me. "…Duo?" he inquires almost noiselessly, innocently.  
  
I dig my eyebrows together as the pain in my heartstrings come to a sharp, fractured peak. "…B-bakayaro!" I manage to snarl out before there is a system malfunction deep in the confines of my chest and unfamiliar hot salt gathers behind my eyes, saturating my overflowing brain with one more thing. Boys don't cry… boys don't ever cry, Duo!  
  
A pang of darkness I've come to label as 'pain' flickers through his distant, shadow-muddled face as he focuses on the barrel of the gun that has come to turn on him harmlessly. Just the fact that I would raise a gun, even an unloaded one, to him in my raging frustration, after his first goddamn genuine apology, seems to accentuate an unspoken fact. In biting bold black neon letters. That fact has no mental materialization in my brain, but I can feel it clawing like knives at the back of my throat all the miserable way down into my stomach. And it seethes there like a vinegar cocktail gone bad.  
  
Heero's beautiful eyes quiet and turn a weary, anguished blue-gray in the dark, dim lighting, before he slowly turns his gaze away and slips away in the black.   
  
There is that routine metallic scraping and clank as the door finds itself again shut and alone with a bed-ridden Shinigami.  
  
There is a few numb seconds… then…  
  
** Ch-chink. **  
  
My beloved colt clatters to the floor after I've found it appropriate to lunge it at the far wall like a disowned toy of death that I've found too boring and thrown a sullen tantrum over. Like a final pathetic happily-ever-after… and I find it all to appropriate at this time for a street-bred American soldier of my ambition to just curl up and slam my nose in between my knees with the grace of a sobbing two-year-old and ignore the screaming pain running up and down my legs in a sick little marathon on loop. The sick circling carousel of my brain nurses my own guilt like a dog lying in an alley licking its beating wounds and it's official. I feel like shit.  
  
I whimper out to no one in my dark death room, my fingers clutched helplessly at my temples. "…But I _am _afraid !"  
  
  
  
  
  
[1] "Taps" for all y'all is the sort of the soldier's funeral song, normally played on a trumpet. Usually they play it in cartoons and movies and stuff when the ship is going down or something like that.  
  
[2] A fat ole hommage to one of my all-time favorite movies, Philadelphia. Andy {played by Tom Hanks}gets fired supposedly because he had misplaced the Highland complaint at his law firm, while it was only a set-up to tarnish Andy's record so Wyant and Wheeler would have a good excuse. That made me really angry, ya know!  
  
Oh and P.S., the lyrics are from "The End" by the Doors.  
  



	7. Superabundant

Chapter 7 – Superabundant  


  
  
It's not easy to forget, granted. But it'll amaze you how hard is to just push something out of your mind so that you can at least function in the normal world. It amazed me, amazed me how much the object of my infatuation seemed to sit inexhaustible and omnipotent in my brain and watch my scattered, distorted thoughts like a picture show. A picture show as loud and useless as a numbed electric storm. He sat as calmly as he had always lived there and belonged nowhere else, silly. And while he lounges in my brain, I find myself sitting just inches from homegrown insanity and the cold bars of Death's gate always pressed into my back. And meanwhile, the little Ghost Heero sitting in my brain always just smiles with a disarming imp grin. Needless to say, I got absolutely no sleep that night. At least when Solo had died and I had dropped dead asleep from crying.  
  
[[ Come on, Du-chan is it really that bad? ]]  
  
I remember vaguely when Quatre came in on medical watch with his hand scratching at his mussed blonde hair and ever-delightful buttery smile lost somewhere in an extreme case of morning breath. Excuse me, blonde rattrap.   
  
It was sometime before dawn I could gather and probably closer to 4 in the morning than any sane hour of the day, any hour that a sane soul would be sitting bolt up in bed. Well, I was. I'm sure there was some sweet, comforting words and looks one-sidedly exchanged to cheer me up, while making those mundane rounds of fixing up the shot-up American idiot with black bowls hanging beneath his eyes. Quatre is an angel for all he does for everyone, always being so understanding and intelligent about even the direst situations and so patient around the most abrasive, stoic people, even the loud and insensitive ones. But when I looked in to his big naively round blue-green eyes that were like brotherly sugar in the dim pink-gray light, I couldn't say anything. I couldn't tell Quatre, even if he was one of my best friends a fourth of my only family left in the world. In the edges of my vision, I noticed a slip in his sweet smile and a flicker of worry clouding behind his eyes.  
  
But I took my new breakfast bowl of warm chicken noodle and my secret and I held it.  
  
The rest of the day dropped simply from my attention and I moved through it like a grief-stricken toddler lost in a vast empty store with his arms constricted around his teddy bear life-line who has finally run out of tears and just wanders aimlessly. All there is in this particular department store, though, are only old familiar rust-red, moth-pocked sweaters in endless stock and supply and fresh gun magazines lined in atrocious-looking displays 30 magazines tall. Gun magazines scattered across the floor, bullets lodged in the sprawled cashiers' foreheads; tiny emaciated children downed in the aisles, the general sick smell of disease looming.  
  
The day was fading off into a ruby grapefruit-colored sunset, as quickly as if I had stood off from the frantic steady flow of time and resigned myself to watching it through an hourglass. It was frightening how quickly time passed and I wondered dreadfully if my life would always pass me by like this from now on. I wondered dreadfully if I would really care anyway if it did.  
  
I was even expected to go back to school, back to the old dormroom.  
  
You see: Duo Maxwell has been excused because of a sudden family death. Please pardon all absences' only lets you leave for a week, not run from reality for the rest of your life.   
  
I still have a war to fight, and a geometry packet due.  
  
So now, here I am. Like some toothless, blind dog to helpless to leave an abusive, neglecting owner and his baseball bat, I seem to go straight back to where I started. The first brick in this sadist's version of the yellow brick road. I find my gun again in my lap and ritualistically dismantle it, legs crossed indian-style and back pressed against my old cardboard pillow. It really is my old room, I think dimly. In the few days of my absences ( mission night, recovery night ) nothing seems to have changed; it's the same old warrior's den. On the painfully void desk pressed against the empty wall lies the ever-popular laptop, closed and silent and still ready to destroy any corrupt life with a few simple codes. My weapons and knives are still kneaded inconspicuously between the mattresses of my bed on the left and my useless, token textbooks remain in a pile beside and underneath my bed.   
  
My headquarters of sorts.  
  
Heero's side is as it should be expected, dictator-immaculate as always and his faint, soapy clean smell is still hovering around. I could open the bathroom door and find the leather still flopped over the side of the sink.  
  
So. Damn. Homey.  
  
The pink-tinted orange light still glows through the windows over each bed, and the greasy cloth laid across my bed still is smeared oil-black.  
  
Deadened and mechanical and as drained as hell is toasty, I begin to wipe the rag smoothly along the surfaces and boxy curves of the individual parts, each so immensely innocent once alone. Once cleaned, I put my Colt back together. I snap those innocent-looking metal facets back into place and just as calmly as I had finished, I begin again. Dismantle, clean, reassemble. The tiny blue-eyed Ghost Heero in my brain curls up in the fashion of a milk-fed puppy and dozes off quietly.  
  
So I repeat. And again, and again, and again. A strange and oddly morbid and romantic cycle like the great king of Corinth forever condemned to rolling a boulder up a hill, which I was supposed to be researching for my history report anyway. But I was too busy at the moment being pumped full of lead.  
  
I have rapidly dissembled my gun for the ninth time before my dulled senses finally register that the door has been opened to let a faint draft and a certain slim brunette in through the door.  
  
My eyes noiselessly shift upward to the blank wall painted a reddish-pink, a sudden, equally blank pit causing a gap in my numb thunderstorm brain. I can instantly sense Heero standing there, but I can't force myself to feel. Locked in a passive apathy. Still automatically cleaning the gun in a hazy stupor, I let my head inconspicuously drop back down a fraction of an inch and the summery pink floats on silently through the room unhindered. The metallic sounds of my Colt fade out in the blandness of my brain and remain there, until I realize there is a person standing beside me.  
  
I stop.  
  
And the silence begins to descend like cold hands running around my neck; until the nothingness is so loud it's drowning out the sound of the adrenaline burning through my veins. The pale blue comforter is suddenly really remarkable too, and the perfect place to hide my eyes, pretend I don't notice the walking ghost of my dreams standing there. Pretend it's only a cold breeze, a figment of my imagination in the fringes of my sight, one more spark of insanity to fan the flames. Pretend I'm fine and fucking dandy.  
  
But I can't fool myself. And obviously, not Heero, either.  
  
the Japanese pilot asks quietly, still as granite stone in the corner of my peripheral vision as I hunch silently over my array of fully cleaned gun parts. Can I talk to you?  
  
That's when I fiercely shut my eyes and curl up even more tightly into my defensiveness, every slashed heartstring in me straining on its last thread not to explode and drop me dead where I sit. Damn it, I feel so suffocated and stupid. I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him! Solo!   
  
I feel my fists clench up in confusion and frustration clawing to get out and the constant mechanical churning and constricting of my stomach going full-tilt. I feel so twisted up; a wild, sparking cable long since loose from the generator of stability. I feel so damned stupid and the hot salt behind my eyes slowly crawls out. I don't want to hurt him!  
  
The little Ghost Heero in my brain suddenly sits awake, prussian blue eyes bright with concern.  
  
I don't want to hurt anyone anymore!  
  
And suddenly the tiny, beautiful little Ghost Heero disappears with an unceremonious silence and I sense dully the mattress bowing beneath me and my eyes dart up from the cotton candy pink wall to the real Heero who now has his steel-bending arms around my shoulders and my heart just stops.   
  
Duo, it's okay, he says quietly, voice weighted with an age-old sincerity and motherly quiet.  
  
It takes every last atom not slashed to pieces by my inner demons' twisted little games to not burst into pathetic tears before he can finish, my hands clenched tightly around any scrap of his tank's green fabric I can find like it's the last thread of life dangled in front of my nose.  
  
Heero's arms squeeze around my shoulders. I don't think you could kill me if you tried, he whispers.  
  
That's when I think everything came to a point for me, when I felt the absolutely human warm shoulder of the killer hit my cheek and the overwhelming sense of quiet strength normally lost beneath a soldier's face hit me like a truck. That's when I finally realized I really did love him, the dark-haired, blue-eyed killer, and the hidden little boy with the strikingly sad eyes beneath it all who now held me. When the red-stained world and illusions of guns and bloody wounds felt like unimportant coins clattering to the floor, when I cried my fucking eyes out into the fabric of the soldier's tanktop until the pink sky long since had faded off into black, when Heero treated me so humanely it was more powerful than any millimeter bullet between the eyes.  
  
Nothing was going to take him away, this time.   
  
Nothing.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The room was blacker than Shinigami feathers with an instantaneous silencing effect, a sacred quietness I reveled in by myself, sitting in the spartan little chair parked in front of Heero's desk. The place that battles with skillet hot air hissing in your ears and thermal blasts tearing at the torn-up landscape around you relentlessly were decided with a few taps on a keyboard, the place that I had watched the Japanese pilot seemingly grow colder and more distant with each line of precise clicking. It was mine for the moment, as the night grew deeper and deeper past midnight. The tattered little mouse beneath my hand was cold and tinny, uttering little complaining rusty clacks as I dragged it relentlessly back and forth, chewing through the silent libraries of information I'd hunted up, chewing quietly, determinedly, for my final piece of peace. My closure for the green-eyes always smiling in the unforgotten corner of my mind.  
  
The dry, bone-white glare of the computer screen cut at my eyes until the inky dark lines and lines and lines and lines up on lines of names began to roll out before me like a thousand curls of black hair.  
  
The blackness surrounding me was as quiet as a grave, I could feel Heero's presence still hovering patiently from somewhere behind me, and all of a sudden, it was there. The demons tailing me from my childhood, snapping at my ankles through the ashes of the Maxwell church and laughing at the corpse of Sister Helen laid down in front of me, slinking ever so faithfully behind me with the malcontent and ill-will of the devil himself, died. In an instant.   
  
Halfway down the page, the thirteenth line from the top of the screen, between thousands of other anonymous forgotten names, lay the name of my green-eyed beloved brother, Solomon Michaels. Died 185 AC, 89RT-B infection.   
  
And for the first time, it took no effort for a truly happy smile to take over my face. No Shinigami grin to hide the Shinigami fear of death and fear of causing death lurking like boils beneath it. I felt completed.   
  
[[[ R.I.P. ]]]  
  
A few moments later, after shutting off the humming computer in need of a well-deserved rest, I slowly turned in the chair, my arm slung over the side. The black I'd grown accustomed to, that sacred quietness saved only for the atmosphere of a hero's funeral, slowly began to fade into a dim, dark blue and I smiled as I saw the ever-patient teenage soldier sitting on the bed, his disheveled brown hair tilted with the comedy of a curious terrier.   
  
With one last deep breath, I left the past behind on a barren dormitory desk and returned to the present; I left the chair and I quietly walked over to the blue-eyed Japanese boy, smiling down at him. Half-startled-innocence, half-quiet-nervousness, Heero replied only in quiet, staring back up at me with his fingers constantly knotting themselves into sixteen different varieties of apprehensive knots. He thought I couldn't see him fidget.  
  
God, I couldn't help but to smile.  
  
The Japanese boy eyes followed like frantic magnets as I quietly pulled the Colt from its half-cocked position in my pocket and put it nonchalantly onto the table. Like it was no big deal to come to grips with Death. And again I grin.  
  
In one last motion, I found the strength to leave the ghost of Solo in peace who had for too long been forced to haunt my brain, a last misty chain of my childhood rattling in my brain and lingering long after I had released the ghosts of my long-since dead parents and the eternally benign memories of Sister Helen and Father Maxwell. In the dark, my lips stretched into an impish ply and I leaned down with the fluid chestnut blur of my braid swinging down from my shoulder.   
  
The unnerved wringing of Heero's thin piano hands froze like a startled kitten under mine, warm and as tense as a slab of heated steel being bent by bare human strength. I watched his now very skittish blue eyes flicker to my face with the most amount of amusement you could imagine without becoming a dangerously masochistic pervert, and grinned once again. 'Night, Heero. And just as the telltale glow of pink clouded just above his cheekbones, I dove in and tasted something much better than garbage soufflé, leaving an innocent lingering kiss on the blue-eyed boy's lips.   
  
Well, garbage soufflé still can get second place if it wants.  


Fin.

[[[ Thank you all so much for your support! ]]]


	8. Soundtrack::

Sound Track
    
    --------------
    
    "Heart-Shaped Box"
    
    by Nirvana
    
    "Killer Queen"
    
    by Queen
    
    "The Leaving Song Pt. II"
    
    by AFI
    
    "The People We Love"
    
    by Bush
    
    "Everybody's Friend"
    
    by Jane's Addiction
    
    "Green Eyes"
    
    by Coldplay
    
    and 
    
    "Subhuman,"
    
    "Skeleton Liar,"
    
    and "Memory of Summer"
    
    by The Pillows
    
    --------------
    
    The .45 Colt War
    
    Pt.1. Guns Are [for the] Artless
    
    Pt.2. Yea, Though I
    
    Pt.3. Sex Machine, Hate Machine
    
    Pt.4. Mmmm, Mmmm, Good
    
    Pt.5. StAiN lIfE
    
    Pt.6. The Things We Do
    
    Pt.7. Superabundant


End file.
